Design and Development of Communication and Control Platform for Medical Tele-diagnosis Robot (MTR)

Abstract

Robotics and Intelligent Systems(myRIS) Research Group, AiRU, University M alaysia Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, 88400, M alaysia Abstract Medical emergencies are happening everyday around the world with varying severity ranging from a common road accident to a distress wounded soldier. The absence of a qualified specialist in hospitals especially in developing countries often leads to misdiagnosis which can be fatal o r causing further deteriorat ion to the patient's condition. This often solved by incorporating mobile tele-presence robots into hospitals however the exorbitant cost in maintaining and setting up the system has prevented the developing countries from using them. Medical Tele-d iagnosis Robot (MTR) is developed to provide a cost efficient alternative fo r the developing countries. MTR is a mobile medical tele-diagnosis robot which allows physicians to communicate with the patients, virtually present to give direction in a med ical procedure, to diagnose patients and to round at the patients' ward. This research has contributed in the development of a doctor-robot interface where the doctor or user can control the robot reliably via regular internet connection fro m a different location, a distributed secured network for MTR's co mmunication, anaudio-visual communicat ion system for tele-d iagnosis and a medical data management system. The overall setup and maintenance cost of MTR is reduced by adopting a decentralized network via hybrid P2P technology. With this, the network load is distributed among the users. As for the audiovisual system, the timeliness of the video transmission fro m the robot to the operator can be attained by CUDA H.264 video encoding to reduce the size of the v ideo stream and by taking advantage of the highly-parallel p rocessors in the graphics processing unit. Medical data management system, provides a decentralized data storage and sharing system to reduce network and server cost. The complete system is tested with a series of experiments to observe its performance and behavior.