ATLANTA: CliniCloud​ is one among a wave of new products that, after years of talk, are turning the promise of telemedicine into reality. As patients push to control their care and governments face rising costs and shrinking tax revenues, companies large and small are innovating quickly to sell them answers.
In recent months Google, Apple and Telstra have all invested serious money in telemedicine. At the other end of the spectrum, start-ups are transforming medical devices that have barely changed for centuries.
Aside from CliniCloud’s smart stethoscope, a Californian company has started selling otoscopes that clip onto smartphone cameras to allow remote viewing of children’s eardrums; Melbourne’s Quanticare Technologies has reimagined the zimmer frame; and a Queensland doctor has created a system that means chemotherapy can be given to patients remotely.
In Boston a hospital is set to start offering a service where newborns can have a droplet of blood from their heel fed into a genome sequencer; it will act as a crystal ball that foretells the risk of everything from short-sightedness to cancer long before they’ve taken their first steps…