Telepointer technology in telemedicine : a review

Abstract

Telepointer is a powerful tool in the telemedicine system that enhances the effectiveness of long-distance communication. Telepointer has been tested in telemedicine, and has potential to a big influence in improving quality of health care, especially in the rural area. A telepointer system works by sending additional information in the form of gesture that can convey more accurate instruction or information. It leads to more effective communication, precise diagnosis, and better decision by means of discussion and consultation between the expert and the junior clinicians. However, there is no review paper yet on the state of the art of the telepointer in telemedicine. This paper is intended to give the readers an overview of recent advancement of telepointer technology as a support tool in telemedicine. There are four most popular modes of telepointer system, namely cursor, hand, laser and sketching pointer. The result shows that telepointer technology has a huge potential for wider acceptance in real life applications, there are needs for more improvement in the real time positioning accuracy. More results from actual test (real patient) need to be reported. We believe that by addressing these two issues, telepointer technology will be embraced widely by researchers and practitioners.

Equalizing latency peaks using a redundant multipath-TCP scheme

“…Currently, we are developing a telemedical augmented reality telepointing device [39], which should be used as our primary testing application for interactive real time. Another aspect is that a far-end connection between the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) in Germany and our partner institution -the University of Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) -shall be established and will be used for field tests of our modified multipath protocol and its behavior at middleboxes.…”

Providing Comprehensive Medication Management in Telehealth

“…Video interaction in real‐time allows for a patient's facial expressions to be assessed, providing additional nonverbal cues regarding his or her health status and understanding of clinical advice. Telepointer technology allows both interactive voice and display of a document or image that can serve as a teaching tool to draw attention to certain aspects of information or images on the screen . However, the reliability and accuracy of the technology require some research before implementation.…”

Wearable laser pointer versus head-mounted display for tele-guidance applications?

“…The types of remote guidance found in literature can be classified into four categories [5]: (1) cursor pointer (the local pointer follows the remote instructors mouse pointer); (2) laser pointer (the local laser pointer rests at a location determined by the remote instructor through a mouse click), (3) sketching [2] (the instructor draws figures, not just points), and (4) hand gestures (a representation of the instructors hands are shown to the local user). While previous studies have proved the superiority of the digital sketches over cursor pointer [3], and faster performance of hand gestures, no significant difference has been reported between user performance when receiving information projected directly onto physical objects vs. information displayed on an external monitor [6] such as the study presented in this paper.…”