International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications Finally, evaluation showed that Tile-Ippokratis services are reliable, from a technical perspective. No technical problems were recorded. Users considered their interaction with the system as a positive experience which makes them consider adoption of such a system in the future. Ofcourse making this platform sustainable is a real challenge especially in low-resource settings such as the Greek context. Issues such as facilitation and maintenance of communication infrastructure, payment of license fees, communication costs, and others are considered to be the problem for sustainability of such services. Maybe local authorities could undertake the responsibility to exploit and disseminate the long-term potentiality of Tile-Ippokratis services. 5. Conclusion The concept and realization of integrated low cost and ease of use ehealth platform for the provision of ehealth services for both patients with chronic diseases and patients who have been served by an intensive care unit have been presented in this paper. The platform based on the use of terrestrial and wireless communication infrastructures supported teleconsultation and ehealth service. The platform ensured bidirectional communication between specialized medical personnel and civilians. The platform provided equal opportunities to all citizens to have heath care services and familiarize them more with information technology. The overall architecture of the platform has been technically tested while well-prepared scenarios have been evaluated. The evaluation results showed the feasibility of the proposed platform to be successfully used by physicians and civilians. Encouraged by these results the optimization of the platform for a wider delivery of telemedical services in the near future is under consideration. It is expected that the use of such platform will eﬀectively improve the provision of health care services, reduce the related costs in terms of time and unnecessary transfers, and increasingly enhance the quality of life of individuals living in remote/isolated regions. The results proved the functionality and utilization of the platform in Greece and Cyprus and the positive impact on psychological health of the participants. However, further actions are needed in order to enable the local health care systems and the diﬀerent group population to be familiarized and use in their everyday live mature technological solutions for the provision of health care services. Acknowledgments The Tile-Ippokratis is an integrated pilot ehealth platform for improving health care provision between rural health centers in the island of Chios and the Nikosia General Hospital/intensive care unit and is founded by INTERREG III Greece-Cyprus fund. The author wishes to thank the project partners and the researchers, for their contribution and fruitful collaboration. The work they performed in these projects has provided valuable insight into some issues addressed in the present paper. 7 References [1] J. Mitchell, “From Telehealth to ehealth, The Unstoppable Rise of ehealth,” John Mitchell & Associates for the Federal Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DOCITA), 1999. [2] Report of the WHO Global Observatory for ehealth, ehealth Tools & Services: Needs of the Member States, 2006. [3] J. C. Kyedar, Ed., “Special issue: success stories in telemedicine. Some empirical evidence,” Telemedicine Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 2003. [4] A. Mart´ınez, V. Villarroel, J. Seoane, and F. del Pozo, “Rural telemedicine for primary healthcare in developing countries,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 13– 22, 2004. [5] E. Kyriacou, S. Pavlopoulos, D. Koutsouris, A. S. Andreou, C. Pattichis, and C. Schizas, “Multipurpose health care ehealth system, II. Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society,” in Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE, vol. 4, pp. 2544–3547, October 2001. [6] P. de Toledo, S. Jime´nez, F. del Pozo, J. Roca, A. Alonso, and C. Hernandez, “Telemedicine experience for chronic care in COPD,” IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 567–573, 2006. [7] M. V. M. Figueredo and J. S. Dias, “Mobile telemedicine system for home care and patient monitoring,” in Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS ’04), vol. 2, pp. 3387–3390, San Francisco, Calif, USA, September 2004. [8] E. J. Go´ mez, M. E. Hernando Pe´rez, T. Vering et al., “The INCA system: a further step towards a telemedical artiﬁcial pancreas,” IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 470–479, 2008. [9] H. J. Lee, S. H. Lee, K.-S. Ha et al., “Ubiquitous healthcare service using Zigbee and mobile phone for elderly patients,” International Journal of Medical Informatics, vol. 78, no. 3, pp. 193–198, 2009. [10] N. Gonzlez and I. Vlez, “Conﬁdence: support to older peoples independent living,” in Proceedings of Psykologi, 2008. [11] ATTENTIANET, “Advanced teleassistance convergent net- work for chronic disease patients and elders project,” http://www.attentianet.eu/. [12] ENABLE, “Ambient assisted living solutions based on advanced ICT technologies,” http://www.enable-project.eu/. [13] K4Care, “Knowledge-based homecare eservices for an ageing Europe,” http://www.k4care.net. [14] G. Graschew, T. A. Roelofs, S. Rakowsky, and P. M. Schlag, “WinVicos—wavelet-based interactive video communication system for medical and non-medical applications,” in Pro- ceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology (ICIT ’02), pp. 864–868, Bangkok, Thailand, 2002. [15] P. Lian, K. Chong, X. Zhai, and Y. Ning, “The quality of medical records in teleconsultation,” Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 35–41, 2003. [16] P. Whitten, L. K. Johannessen, T. Soerensen, D. Gammon, and M. Mackert, “A systematic review of research methodology in telemedicine studies,” Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 230–235, 2007. [17] H. Papadopoulos, “Comparative study of “functional” mobile applications,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Sympo- sium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC ’08), Cannes, France, 2008.