Please see my updated page on human teleoperation
Many remote communities have poor access to healthcare, even in wealthy countries like Canada. As a result, they spend up to almost half their annual healthcare budget on transporting patients to cities for treatment and diagnosis. While robotic telemedicine systems are often expensive and complex for such small communities, and video conferencing systems are inefficient and imprecise, we are developing a novel method of "teleoperating" a novice person via mixed reality to carry out medical ultrasound with tightly-coupled expert guidance. We have built a fully functioning prototype system and have characterized human performance in this mode of control, finding that it is comparable to robotic systems. Hence my research focuses on applying concepts from bilateral robotic teleoperation with time delays to this human-in-the-loop system. Additionally, we will explore AI for autonomous guidance of exams, and we are working on computer vision, HCI, high-speed communication over 5G, and instrumentation.