Robotic Auscultation over Clothes for Eliminating Gender Bias
Ryosuke Tsumura, Akihiro Umezawa, Yuko Morishima, Hiroyasu Iwata, Yoshihiko Koseki, Naotaka Nitta, Kiyoshi Yoshinaka
Abstract
During auscultation, patients in difficult age often feel embarrassed and uncomfortable when exposing their chests to doctors of the different gender and being touched physically by doctors. We assume that an auscultation with robot technology can address the aforementioned gender-related issue. Toward eliminating gender bias during auscultation exam, this paper proposes a robotic platform which enables to perform the automated auscultation over clothes. Our developed system is comprised of two folds: a depth image-based estimation system of the listening positions over clothes with RGB-D camera and a contact force adjustment system for minimizing the acoustic attenuation due to the clothes with a passive-actuated end-effector. Our preliminary results demonstrated the robotic platform enables to estimate the listening locations to hear the sounds of four cardiac valves over the clothes by combining the estimated skeletal structure with statistical anatomical data and acquire the maximized acoustic quality over the clothes by adjusting the contact force. The developed robotic platform has the potential to address the gender-related issues in auscultation.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2022_roboticauscultat,
title = {Robotic Auscultation over Clothes for Eliminating Gender Bias},
author = {Ryosuke Tsumura and Akihiro Umezawa and Yuko Morishima and Hiroyasu Iwata and Yoshihiko Koseki and Naotaka Nitta and Kiyoshi Yoshinaka},
booktitle = {IROS 2022},
year = {2022}
}