Optical Multi-touch System for Patient Monitoring and Medical Data Analysis

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges in medical environments nowadays is finding a way to collect and display vital patient data for monitoring and diagnosis purposes. While communication and image storage standards such as DICOM do exist, the relevant data is still split up between different workstations and proprietary visualization equipments. Multi-touch, multi-user display devices can bring an important contribution to collaborative medical work and can also act as an administrative tool for hospitals. Based on our previous research, a high resolution optical multi-touch system has been implemented where relevant medical data can be visualized and manipulated through intuitive finger movements without the need of standard computer peripherals. A full set of software applications for this purpose has been designed in order to test the viability of this method.