InfoCom says e-health in Europe already a multi-billion market, due to grow more in the coming years.

STUTTGART, GERMANY November 24, 2010 (Press-News.org) According to a recent research carried out by InfoCom, in Western Europe, although the number of offers addressing different needs is growing steadily, most of available e-health solutions are services for tele-monitoring — for instance remotely monitoring vital signs of patients — or, alternatively, services addressing disabled people. Already a multi-billion market, e-health is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.

E-health in general consists of various telecommunication and IT solutions for the healthcare sector connecting medical informatics, health services and the delivery of information through the Internet and other related technologies. Most of e-health solutions are services supporting physicians and hospital staff, analysis services via mobile phones, emergency and locating services, healthcare hotlines and information services, multimedia solutions, offers for disabled people, reminder services and tele-monitoring.

Mobile network operators offer most of the services for disabled and elderly people. They usually provide complete solutions, from services and end-devices up to customer support and billing. Next to online support and telephone services, some carriers offer the possibility for disabled people to be visited by their own staff to provide them more information about available services, as Swisscom in Switzerland (Swisscom@Home) or Vodafone in Hungary. Mobile carriers often closely cooperate with specific national organisations, for instance associations for blind people, to develop solutions and launch pilots tailored to people with special needs.

Besides mobile network operators, also specialised companies, offering for instance certain end-devices, products and solutions for disabled people are active in the market of e-health. The Spanish company Code Factory, for instance, one of the global leaders in its segment, develops screen readers, magnifiers, Braille interfaces for mobile devices, text-to-speech technology for various languages and GPS navigation software for blind and visually impaired people. Some of their customers are operators such as AT&T, Bouygues, SFR and Vodafone. Another company offering products for blind and visually impaired people is Humanware. The company offers special end-devices for reading and writing, as well as a navigation solution.

Many of the e-health services active today have only been launched within most recent years and several services are still been tested in pilot projects. However, the number of services available will increase further within the next coming years as to allow elderly or impaired people access to communication solutions it is not only part of the corporate responsibility of the providers, it is also quite a lucrative business model.

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InfoCom is a market research and consultancy company with almost 20 years experience providing strategic analyses and planning assistance to stakeholders in the telecommunications, IT and multimedia industries. InfoCom's independent and fact-based analyses highlight trends and opportunities, supporting decision makers to understand market dynamics in order to maintain their competitive advantage.