A Home-Care Telemedicine System Using Combined Computer Network : The Hyper Hospital at Home

Abstract

We have been developing a network based medical system called the Hyper Hospital. The Hyper Hospital is constructed on the computer and multi-media based network whose major human-machine-human interface is the virtual reality dedicated to the patients. In the present study, we developed a system extending the Hyper Hospital to an in-house home local area network (LAN) using World Wide Web as an interface and the medical care equipment named INUTA-net. The INUTA-net is a half automatic robot which looks like a puppet dog equipped with monitoring and communication interfaces which provides remote interactive monitoring facilities controlled by a distant caretaker through the network.