Robotic Auscultation over Clothes for Eliminating Gender Bias
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Tsumura, Ryosuke; Umezawa, Akihiro; Morishima, Yuko; Iwata, Hiroyasu; Koseki, Yoshihiko; Nitta, Naotaka; Yoshinaka, Kiyoshi
- Source
- 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on. :6468-6475 Oct, 2022
- Subject
- Bioengineering
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Transportation
Force
Robot vision systems
Estimation
Medical services
Valves
Cameras
Acoustics
- Language
- ISSN
- 2153-0866
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.