Abstract: Evolution from wired to wireless communication systems has brought great advantages to many sectors including telehealth services. Telehealth allows health care professionals to diagnose and treat patients in remote locations using telecommunication technology. In few developed countries, telehealth has become standard medical practice. Over 10,000 peer review papers have been published during past 20 years supporting the clinical effectiveness and cost savings of telehealth. Unfortunately, telehealth has not been implemented widely yet. In order to identify the resistance and enabling factors for the implementation of telehealth especially in developing countries, a comprehensive study has been done and will be presented in this conference. This includes communication and application technologies, standard and legal issues, cost and business models, as well as user and key player requirements. The study result shows that technology has become an important enabling factor. Some technologies even have fulfilled the critical requirements such as reliability, user friendliness, simplicity, safety, security, cost effectiveness, connectivity and compatibility. However, without solving of related legal issues, implementation of excellence business model as well as user acceptance, telehealth will be difficult to be implemented widely. Some telehealth models also will be presented in this conference. It is hoped that the developed model can be widely implemented in the near future. This will benefit to people in rural areas, developing countries, correction facilities (prison and rehabilitation centre), schools, mobile units, disaster areas, and industrial units (mines).

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Assoc. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eko Supriyanto is the head of Department for Clinical Science and Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. He obtained his PhD in electronics engineering from University of Federal Armed Forces Germany, Hamburg. He worked as an academic staff at this university and a product development manager in private company in Duesseldorf, Germany, before moved to Malaysia. He was also a visiting professor at Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany. His involvement in the computer network and internet has been started with the development of Radio Packet Network Operating System (RPNOS) in 1994. He has 12 patents with some of them are for telemedicine products. He also obtained more than 20 international awards including awards for telemedicine system and interface. He has more than 100 publications in international journals and book chapters and one of authors in the Book of “Advances in Telemedicine: Technologies, Enabling Factors and Scenarios” edited by University of Medicine, Berlin, published by INTECH in March 2011. He was also active in WSEAS conferences since 2009 as speaker for 27 papers and session chairman.