Users and their needs
The system is addressed to end users belonging to Military Health Services of France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The hospitals involved in the pilot will be in Europe and in some remote areas of operations.
The main need refers to Medical Services deployed for peacekeeping and humanitarian missions in geographically isolated and underserved areas, with the most difficult environmental and operational conditions due to the lack of local medical specialists. The T4MOD project will use two space assets (i.e. satellite communications and use of a technology initially developed for manned spaceflights: robotised tele-echography).
Service/ system concept
The following telemedicine services will be the primary focus of the project:
- Radiology
- Microbiology
- Cardiology
- Dermatology
- Trauma surgery
- Neurosurgery
- Intensive care
- Emergency medicine (casualty care and management)
A high layer application will be developed with the purpose of managing the services within and inter- and ita-operable environment. This layer will simplify the system operations and integrate elements that could simplify the standard medical workflow while keeping the compliance with the working procedure of the end users. Finally it will help to extract, in the friendliest and automatic way, those parameters that could contribute to measuring the clinical performance gain. These important advantages will be enhanced by means of an efficient satellite architecture.
Space Added Value
T4MOD relies on two main assets coming from space technologies: one side satellite communications, and on the other side a robotized tele-echography solution initially developed to support crews on board the International Space Station.
Current Status
After the successful close-out of the field trials activities, a sustainability analysis has been performed, including an assessment of the lessons learnt during the project. This analysis highlights in particular the potentials for a possible commercial deployment of the T4MOD service, which is based on a reliable and highly performing technological solution.
The perspectives for a “Dual Use” follow-on have also been investigated, showing high potential opportunities to use the T4MOD System use in civilian environments.
All these aspects, together with the finalised main Deliverables and Project Documents have been discussed during Final Meeting, held on 2015 October 14th, which declared the successful closure of the T4MOD Project activities.
The final presentation of T4MOD was given during the ARTES 20 ESA Presentations Day Workshop, held at ESA ESTEC Premises in Noordwjik (NL) on November 19th, 2015.
