ジェンダーバイアスを排する自動聴診ロボットシステム

―衣服による音響減衰を抑制する押圧制御手法の構築―

抄録

For patients who are often embarrassed and uncomfortable for exposing and touching their breasts to physicians of different gender during auscultation, we are developing a robotic system performing auscultation over clothing. As the technical issue, the sound obtained through the clothing is often attenuated. This study aims to investigate the clothing-induced acoustic attenuation and develop a suppression method of it. Our hypothesis is that the attenuation is improved by compressing clothing and shorten the sound propagation distance. Then, the amplitude spectrum of heart sound is obtained over several clothes of different thicknesses and materials in a phantom study and human trial at varying contact forces with a developed passive-actuated end-effector. Our results demonstrated the feasibility of the attenuation suppression method by applying an optimum contact force, which varied on the clothing condition, in the phantom experiments and human trials.