Asynchronous Telemedicine Diagnosis of Musculoskeletal Injuries through a Prototype Interface in Virtual Reality Environment

Telehealth provides a much needed option for remote diagnosis and monitoring of various pathologies and patients. Remote provision of health care can offer a two fold support for the medical system and the patients. Primarily it could serve isolated locations and secondly it could monitor a large number of outpatient cases directly on their homes instead of the hospital premises. However in specific cases direct communication and visual data acquisition can be a major obstacle. To this end we have developed a prototype system that could enable the medical practitioners to have real-time diagnosis through 3D captured visual and motion data. This data are recreated in a Virtual Reality environment in the hospital facilities offering a unique system for remote diagnosis. This paper presents the design considerations and development process of the system and discusses the preliminary results from the system evaluation. The paper concludes with a tentative plan of future work which aims to offer the medical practitioners and the patient with a complete interface which can acquire gait data and thus analyse a large variety of musculoskeletal pathologies.