Enabling telemedicine with smartphones

As smartphone technology continues to mature, one of the many areas it can help enhance is telemedicine: the concept of using telecommunications to provide health information from a distance. A new medical condition or disease can require frequent visits to the doctor for simple biometric monitoring. These frequent visits are time-consuming and can be extremely inconvenient for the patient. This report describes how a smartphone can be the optimal platform to communicate critical biometric measurements to one's physician, reduce in-person hospital visits, and still allow for the patient to receive feedback from the doctor. A proof-of-concept infrastructure for enabling telemedicine is demonstrated by interfacing a glucose meter with an Android device that uploads that data to the Cloud to be viewed by the doctor.