Augmented telemedicine platform for real-time remote medical consultation

Abstract

Current telemedicine systems for remote medical consultation are based on decades old video-conferencing technology. Their primary role is to deliver video and voice communication between medical providers and to transmit vital signs of the patient. This technology, however, does not provide the expert physician with the same hands-on experience as when examining a patient in person. Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) on the other hand have the capacity to enhance the experience and communication between healthcare professionals in geographically distributed locations. By transmitting RGB+D video of the patient, the expert physician can interact with this real-time 3D representation in novel ways. Furthermore, the use of AR technology at the patient side has potential to improve communication by providing clear visual instructions to the caregiver. In this paper, we propose a framework for 3D real-time communication that combines interaction via VR and AR. We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework on a prototype system consisting of a depth camera, projector and 3D display. The system is used to analyze the network performance and data transmission quality of the multimodal streaming in a remote scenario.