[Telemedicine for patients with facial palsy : Current developments and options in otorhinolaryngologic treatment]. / Telemedizin bei Fazialisparese : Aktuelle Entwicklungen und Möglichkeiten bei der Behandlung in der HNO-Heilkunde.

Digitalization is also becoming increasingly important in medicine. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this process and politicians are trying to create a framework for successful knowledge transfer and better digital medical care. This article describes the role of telemedicine in the treatment of patients suffering from facial nerve palsy. Facial nerve palsy has a wide range of effects, from limitations in facial mobility to psychological sequelae. While many of the acute, idiopathic facial nerve palsies improve after a few weeks, around a third of those affected develop synkinesis, involuntary movements that have lifelong functional and psychological consequences. Treatment includes various modalities, from medication and surgery to movement training. Telemedicine offers innovative solutions in cases of regional underuse, but also in the treatment of chronic facial nerve palsies. The article defines the term "telemedicine" in the current context and presents different types of application. A detailed analysis of the application scenarios of telemedicine in facial nerve palsy patients shows that despite a lack of evidence, many potentially useful concepts exist.

Label-Free SERS and MD Analysis of Biomarkers for Rapid Point-of-Care Sensors Detecting Head and Neck Cancer and Infections.

For the progress of point-of-care medicine, where individual health status can be easily and quickly monitored using a handheld sensor, saliva serves as one of the best-suited body fluids thanks to its availability and abundance of physiological indicators. Salivary biomarkers, combined with rapid and highly sensitive detection tools, may pave the way to new real-time health monitoring and personalized preventative therapy branches using saliva as a target matrix. Saliva is increasing in importance in liquid biopsy, a non-invasive approach that helps physicians diagnose and characterize specific diseases in patients. Here, we propose a proof-of-concept study combining the unique specificity in biomolecular recognition provided by surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) in combination with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, which give leave to explore the biomolecular absorption mechanism on nanoparticle surfaces, in order to verify the traceability of two validated salivary indicators, i.e., interleukin-8 (IL-8) and lysozyme (LYZ), implicated in oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) and oral infection. This strategy simultaneously assures the detection and interpretation of protein biomarkers in saliva, ultimately opening a new route for the evolution of fast and accurate point-of-care SERS-based sensors of interest in precision medicine diagnostics.