OBJECTIVES To test the hypotheses that, compared with conventional outpatient consultations, joint teleconsultation (virtual outreach) would incur no increased costs to the NHS, reduce costs to patients, and reduce absences from work by patients and their carers. DESIGN Cost consequences study alongside randomised controlled trial. SETTING Two hospitals in London and Shrewsbury and 29 gener...

Virtual patients have great potential for training patient-doctor communication skills. There are two approaches to producing the virtual human speech: synthesized speech or recorded speech. The tradeoffs in flexibility, fidelity, and cost raise an interesting development decision: which speech approach is most appropriate for virtual patients? Two groups of medical students participated in a u...

Anxiety is an increasingly common feeling in our society; it can be very debilitating and, if not properly treated, can evolve to more serious health problems. This paper describes a low-cost Virtual Reality solution to support the treatment of social anxiety, more specifically the anxiety of speaking in front of an audience. Our application involves: i) a simulation that takes place in a virtu...

Cloud spending has risen on a year-to-year basis, with the pandemic acting as primary catalyst for its recent growth; however, “cloud waste,” referring to cloud resources that are not used their full capacity, also follows this upward trend and causes loss of an increasingly large amount money. Unfortunately, present-day research lacks data-driven studies analyze why users wasting resources, or...

For patients with chronic diseases, exercise is a key part of rehab to deal better with their illness. Some of them do rehabilitation at home with telemedicine systems. However, keeping to their exercising program is challenging and many abandon the rehabilitation. We postulate that information technologies for socializing and serious games can encourage patients to keep doing physical exercise...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of using a 'virtual clinic' on patient experience and cost in the care of women with urinary incontinence. MATERIALS AND METHODS Women, aged > 18 years referred to a urogynaecology unit were randomised to either (1) A Standard Clinic or (2) A Virtual Clinic. Both groups completed a validated, web-based interactive, patient-reported outome measure (ePAQ-Pelvic ...