USING SATELLITES FOR WORLDWIDE TELE-HEALTH AND EDUCATION - THE GATES PROPOSAL

The world is currently witnessing a revolution in communication and in formation technologies. Concepts like global personal communications v ia satellite and the 'information superhighway' are becoming common te rms in a growing information society. At the same time, basic educatio n and health care are major problems for billions of world citizens. E xpected increases in population in the most affected regions will wors en the situation. In an effort to address those critical problems, par ticipants in the International Space University's 1994 summer session have produced a proposal for GATES, a Global Access Tele-health and Ed ucation System. By using the advanced communications and information t echnologies in tele-health and tele-education applications, GATES aims to improve basic education and medical care on a global scale.