Emergency Auscultation Sound Transmission System Using Web Conferencing Services in Japan

The impact of COVID-19 has led to a rapid increase in the demand for home medicine and telemedicine at a global level. This is also true in Japan. However, telemedicine in Japan is mainly carried out by telephone or video calls, and does not cover the provision of information by percussion, palpation, or auscultation. As a result, remote auscultation services are not widely available, and we were unable to use them for "COVID-19." In this paper, we focus on auscultation sounds and construct a mechanism to remotely transmit auscultation sounds, with the aim of increasing information that physicians can use to make judgments and thus contribute to more accurate diagnoses. Based on this, we shall consider a system that can use existing web conferencing services to transmit auscultation and enable remote auscultation in countries where specialist services cannot be used (i.e., in the case of disasters) or where such specialist services are not widely available.