Telehealth today doesn’t just involve chatting with a doctor via a video-conferencing application. It’s become an entire collection of rapidly developing technologies and products that includes specialized applications, wearable devices, implantable sensors, and cloud databases, many of which have only appeared in the past couple of years.
However, telehealth in its current form began to take shape at the end of the 20th century when video consultations first appeared. Developments in the telehealth area were considered promising even before the pandemic. For example, the startup Proteus Digital Health back in 2014 created sensor-enabled pharmaceuticals that received hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. The goal of this project was to help medical professionals track their patients’ medication. After being taken by the patients, the tablets were supposed to send a signal to a wearable patch; from there, the data would be sent to a special application. However, almost as soon as development began, serious questions arose about the security of the service’s data storage and the possibility of it being misused. In 2020, Proteus went bankrupt.
With the onset of the pandemic, there has been a new impetus to develop the telehealth market. With numerous public health restrictions in place, the ability to help patients remotely has become a lifeline for many, with clinics rushing to organize at least some kind of interface for people to chat with doctors in a way that reduces the risk of COVID-19 infection. Research by the company telehealth frontier medicine security
