Arslani began surfing the Web as a licensed practical nurse at U-M's Mott Children's Hospital to help provide parents of sick children with answers to the questions they asked about their child's illness. Having served in the US Army as a medical specialist/corps man, he was adept at manipulating data and the hardware and software necessary to manage them. Soon, he became interested in the new field of nursing informatics--the application of information science and computer science to the field of nursing.

Arslani's interest grew stronger when he took a professional development course from nursing Prof. Janice Lindberg and did a paper on nursing resources on the Internet. By the time he arrived at the School of Nursing, he was a natural for Nursing's UMTV cable TV system. He has worked in the program since 1995, wiring new-tech hardware, learning quirky software programs and teaching faculty and students how to put it all together to teach and to learn.

Arslani eventually took engineering Prof. Lynn Conway's Visual Communications class and later became one of her teaching assistants. Working in the College of Engineering and having been in the military, he saw the synergestic effect that nursing and computer systems could have on one another.

Most of his work has involved linking up the software that will be needed to make connections like those between terminally ill patients and their families at remote sites. "Even with the support of hospice programs," he notes, "there is a need for friends and family to be there with the patient. Sometimes they can't be. That's where video conferencing like this comes in."

While much of the Nursing UMTV program is still in the "vision stage," Arslani has already had a taste of its immense possibilities. Last year, in a course, with the aid of Nursing UMTV equipment and the knowledge gained through Conway's course, he set up a special program for an 11-year-old girl fighting leukemia at U-M Hospital to visit with her classmates in Grand Rapids. In a local TV station's broadcast of the story, the girl is shown smiling and waving to her classmates from her hospital bed.

Through the use of Cornell University's free CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software—a means of live videoconferencing over the Internet from anywhere in the world with a small videocamera—the girl saw and spoke to her classmates for the first time in two months. She then talked to the newscaster about how lonely she had been and how it hard it was to be in the hospital while her friends were back home. [Since this article was written, CU-SeeMe has "gone commercial."—Ed.]

With CU-SeeMe and other software, Arslani says, "We're moving towards a lot more home health care. With applications such as videoconferencing, a nurse can check on patients right in their own homes and review care procedures with them or even watch them as they do the procedure and correct them as they go. They can actually see the patient in front of them instead of having to rely upon the voice on the telephone and the patient's description to see what is going on."

Nursing Prof. Ruth Barnard agrees. "Just imagine how practical it would be to videotape the instructions your doctor gives you before you leave the hospital and take them with you," she says. The Nursing UMTV program is in Barnard's bailiwick and she sees bright things in its future, providing she can buy the equipment instead of renting it and have the staff to implement the possibilities she sees for this new technology.

All U-M students have access to UMTV in their dorm rooms. They can tune in to programs such as "All About Being a Bone Marrow Donor for Your Sibling," an edited rebroadcast of a recent University Health Forum, or "Adjusting to New Campus Life," in which one Nursing student interviewed seasoned students, counselors and health services personnel about health issues related to college life.

All Nursing classrooms are wired with UMTV capabilities which has made it easy for Nursing to use UMTV for coaching and will enable the School to offer distance learning programs in the future. Barnard's students have conducted interviews with Army captains, surgical nurses, and nursing researchers so that students have a better understanding of what it's really like to do those kinds of nursing jobs.

Barnard admits, "There are things you can teach and some things you have to learn by doing. And as nursing professionals, we know where there's value to be gained from using the new technology-and when you have to do things face-to-face."

"But UMTV is not just talking heads," Arslani emphasizes. "You can see close-ups of the instruments with a camera or through the Visualizer," a piece of equipment that operates like a 3-D projector, casting the image into the computer instead of onto a wall. "It's as interactive as you can get without being there. You can zoom in on what the nurses are doing. You don't have to interrupt. And in some cases you get a better view of what's going on and the nurse's role in the operating room."

A better view is very important in the field of nursing. And that's just what this Canton, Michigan, resident will get this summer when he starts his first job in the field of informatics nursing at a new 54-acre Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Laredo, Texas. There, he will construct a large-scale clinical database that will help the stage for the new technologies yet to come.

Arslani is both excited and realistic about the possibilities. "Technology will eventually catch up and surpass this," he says, pointing to the array of equipment around him, "but UMTV gives us a head start on the applications that will take place when the Web is finally fully hooked up to TV."

Cathy Mellett is an Ann Arbor freelancer.

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