Students provide free telehealth monitoring service for the community

Nine graduate students from NTU, Singapore have started an initiative to carry out a free health monitoring exercise for 1,000 people.

Known as the Community Telehealth Service (CTS), it aims to provide free health monitoring at public venues such as community centres to Singaporeans above 50 years of age, as well as those who have had their regular health check-ups deferred due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The nine students are from the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme.

The check-ups will take place in specially constructed telemedicine booths that leverage the latest health technologies to test for eye and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, as well as obesity.

The computerised health screening system is provided by South Korean healthcare startup Medi-Whale. It uses an automated camera to take several images of a person’s eye and its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system then processes the retinal images to determine an individual’s health conditions.

The pilot for the Community Telehealth Service will be held from 9 January 2021 to 28 February 2021 at Punggol 21 Community Club.

Following the pilot, the CTS team is already working on plans to ramp up their efforts to deploy more telehealth monitoring booths in other heartland districts, in collaboration with new and existing partners.