Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 8, numbers 3 and 4, 2016 // View article

KINECT-Based Auscultation Practice System

Authors:
Yoshitoshi Murata
Kazuhiro Yoshida
Natsuko Miura
Yoshihito Endo

Keywords: simulator, auscultation, nursing, KINECT

Abstract:
Students in medical and nursing schools have to practice auscultation. Students usually learn disease sounds, correct points and order for locating a stethoscope on a body in the practice. Humanoid simulators have been widely introduced to practice auscultation. They are effective to learn disease sounds. However, most humanoids cannot detect whether or not a stethoscope is located on a body and which part of body a stethoscope is placed on. And also, since they are too expensive, the number of them is not enough for the number of students in a class. In this paper, we propose a low-cost and high performance system for the practice of auscultation. In this system, students themselves play the role of a patient, instead of a humanoid, and stethoscope locations on the body are measured with KINECT. Also, appropriate disease sounds including normal ones can be assigned at some points on the upper body. Practicing students hear such disease sounds, synchronized with the movement of breathing, through earphones when a stethoscope is placed on the assigned points. Movements of the upper body from breathing can also be detected by KINECT. Experimental results with a prototype showed that our system could perfectly detect stethoscope locations on a body, except for a few lower points, and it could also detect respiratory changes on the front body. The results of a questionnaire for nursing students and practicing nurses showed that our proposed system was useful for them to learn auscultation.

Pages: 277 to 288

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2016. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2016

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660