The high cost of citizen healthcare expenses has been for some years now a matter of concern for societies. Moreover, healthcare costs are expected to increase during the next decade. This is partially due to the increase in people's life expectancy worldwide which will be 70 years old in 2020. Also considering the new lifestyles, such as obesity, will cause an increase in the cost of derived illnesses. In this regard, it is estimated that 2000 million people will suffer from obesity in 2020 and that 80% of them will develop some form of diabetes.

Information technologies and communications have shown their efficiency in providing solutions that reduce medical costs. Mainly because it is possible to perform certain activities at the patients' domiciles that in the past were carried out in sanitary environments where the cost is much higher. Or bring specialized care services to health centres closer to people.

In this environment, Telefónica I+D is developing health services based on communication aimed to improve users' quality of life, providing Medicine with new technologies and optimising processes in this area.

In this context, Telefónica I+D is working on developing mobile telecare for the telemonitoring of the elderly, sanitary telecare to provide services of telehospitalization (for both the caring of chronic patients and telerehabilitation) and hospital advanced services for remote control of medical applications and sharing of content and concurrent information.

Products

"Colabor@" is an environment of collaboration among health professionals and its focus is to provide tools so that the communication can be as complete as possible.