[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFRJGudOT0[/youtube]
In the Bloggers Bus Tour organized by Orange, I had the opportunity to participate in a demonstration of the system Sense.ly DocPal developed within Orange Labs. DocPal is a diagnostic and analysis system that helps you quickly and efficiently obtain a correct diagnosis for many health problems. The system works with the help of a Kinect sensor, augmented reality, a spoken word recognition system, a human anatomy recognition system, but also a special interface, its role being to quickly diagnose a problem, but also to to help doctors monitor the condition of a patient they are under treatment. DocPal can be used both as a triage system for patients who do not go directly to a hospital or to the family doctor, but it can also be used to maintain a connection with the doctor who monitors the evolution of a disease under treatment.
The system made by Orange is practically a kind of virtual doctor with whom you talk and interact based on gestures and spoken words, he takes information from you about health problems, analyzes the information, giving you details about them, possible exercises that will help you fix them and finally a connection to a specialized doctor or even to the hospital. DocPal uses the Kinect sensor and gestures to locate the source of a pain, through the word recognition system it tries to understand exactly what symptoms you have, and based on them to look for relevant information for a diagnosis that it will automatically send to a doctor, who take care of solving any health problem you have.
DocPal interacts with various accessories available in your home, can take information directly from them and send them to your doctor/a new doctor or even to a hospital. DocPal contains detailed information about human anatomy, the symptoms of various diseases, but also possible remedies for them, with users being shown video clips or text materials with all the necessary information. The interface specially chosen by Orange for DocPal has the role of simplifying user interaction with the virtual robot and we all know that such a system needed a human face. For mobile terminals, DocPal will be available in a somewhat simpler version, unable to receive gestures, but able to listen to your pain and help you get the help you need.
DocPal has already been presented to some doctors in the USA, some are interested in it and practically here we see the medicine of the future. In a few years we will be able to do such things directly in our home and to be honest, something like this has been needed for a long time and I hope that in the USA the system will be adopted on a large scale, so that later it will spread to Europe as well.
