I keep running into the same device at a few health conferences here in Germany: a wand about the size of an electric razor, plugged into a phone, showing a live ultrasound feed. That's point-of-care ultrasound, or POCUS, and it's becoming one of the more concrete versions of "telehealth" I've seen.

Philips' Lumify runs the exam on the transducer itself and streams video-call consults through its Reacts platform, so a physician miles away can guide a scan in real time. ASUS built a portable ultrasound app, MediConnect, that won an iF Design Award for doing the same thing with a cleaner interface. Both point at the same shift: the bottleneck was never the imaging technology, it was getting a scanner and a specialist into the same room.

That's what's pulling me in. A device that fits in a coat pocket and runs 7.5 hours of scanning can reach an ambulance, a rural clinic, or a field hospital that would never get a radiology department. I'm currently sketching my own design project in this space, and I'll publish it once it's further along.

For now, POCUS is the clearest evidence I've seen that telehealth isn't just video calls.

ASUSTek Computer Inc. (2023). ASUS portable ultrasound solution. iF Design. https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/asus-portable-ultrasound-solution/555568

Gates Foundation. (n.d.). AI ultrasounds. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/science-innovation-technology/future-womens-health-technology/ai-ultrasounds

Koninklijke Philips N.V. (2025). Lumify ultrasound on Android [Brochure]. https://www.philips.com/lumify

Le, M. P. T., Voigt, L., Nathanson, R., et al. (2022). Comparison of four handheld point-of-care ultrasound devices by expert users. Ultrasound Journal, 14, 27. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13089-022-00274-6