• haptic feedback
• tele-auscultation
• telemedicine

The remote examination is becoming more and more important since the population is becoming older and the number of required medical examination is growing.

The system proposed here is a novel system for remote examination for the particular case of auscultation. The system is located at two sites: at the Patient Site the patient lays supine, a robotic interface holds and places over the patient trunk the electronic stethoscope able to send sounds to PC; an RGB-D camera placed over the patient shoots the whole scene. At the Doctor Site the doctor has a haptic interface using which he or she moves the robotic interface at the Patient Site, moreover the doctor can see the scene shot at the Patient Side by the camera on an LCD screen and can hear sounds captured by the stethoscope thanks to a diaphragm and a headset where the audio stream from the Patient Side is played.

The presented system is based on three different feedback types: the audio feedback, the video feedback, and the haptic feedback; even if during this project a Local Area Network is used, the three feedback channels can communicate over the Internet using TCP and UPD.

After presenting this novel system the effectiveness of the developed work will be shown using auscultation-like experiments. First the usability of the system for placing the stetho- scope will be investigated, then the correctness of listened sounds will be checked. Finally, considerations a brief summary of the whole project will be provided together with the encountered problems and possible future improvements.