ABSTRACT
On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, while in the process of inventing the telephone, summoned his assistant Mr Thomas Watson for medical assistance through the telephone wire, because he had spilled battery acid on himself. This incident was quoted by J. H. Thrall as the first-ever recorded case of remote emergency call giving birth to telephone-based telemedicine (Thrall, 2007a). Over the next century, step-by-step technological advancements in communications, including the wired telephone, the radiotelephone, global satellite communications, and modern Internet, in conjunction with the revolution in informatics that employed computer-based applications for acquirement, storage, postprocessing, and transmission of patient data, have fuelled an acceleration in various fields of telemedicine. Physicians are already experiencing unprecedented changes in everyday clinical practice, including services like telepathology, teledermatology, telemonitoring of the elderly, or even remote physical examination of patients through robotic interaction (Anvari et al., 2005; Balis, 1997; Della Mea, 1999; Gu et al., 2009).
