Wi-Fi Networking News' Glenn Fleishman reports today on a trial deployment by Intel and UC Berkeley of wireless remote diagnostics equipment in India.

"In the southern India state of Tamil Nadu, a central eye hospital can now examine patients through outposts up to dozens of miles away using Wi-Fi to transmit image data from cameras," Fleishman writes. "Thousands of patients were served in this trial, and the university reports that the project will be expanded to five hospitals, 50 linked clinics, and an expected 500,000 patients a year."

The setup is simple -- a nurse does the screening at the village, using a Web camera to allow a doctor at the Aravind Eye Hospital to examine the patient's eyes. If the doctor needs to see more, or thinks surgery is necessary, then the patient is given a hospital appointment.

"What we've done here is develop a simple, inexpensive software and hardware system that can provide villages with a high-bandwidth connection to computer networks in cities as far as 50 miles away," says Eric Brewer, Director of the Intel Research Berkeley Lab.

As Fleishman points out, the larger implications of this are truly inspiring. "Once you have local clinics with high bandwidth that can then hop on a larger national network, you can have doctors all over the country (or world) contribute hours towards diagnostic work, reducing the time that patients have to spend in travel or untreated due to cost," he writes.