Teleoperated Multimodal Robotic Interface for Telemedicine: a Case Study on Remote Auscultation

The remote examination is becoming more and more important as the population is aging and experts lack as ever before. We propose a novel system which is suitable for remote examination and in particular for remote auscultation. The system is located at two sites, at the patient site a robot holds a stethoscope which is placed on the patient while an RGB-D sensor streams a video of the scene. At the doctor site, the doctor interacts with a haptic interface that allows s/he to move the stethoscope while receiving haptic feedback when the stethoscope is in contact with the patient and looking at the remote scene on a screen. The doctor listens to the noise from the stethoscope thanks to a diaphragm and a headset where the audio stream from the patient site is played. After presenting this novel system, we show its effectiveness by means of experiments that involve auscultation-like tasks. We show the usability of the system to place the stethoscope, the usability to hear correctly the noise of the heart as well as the overall quality of the streamed audio signal.