Sensory substitution for internet-based E-healthcare robotic system

A critical challenge residing in E-healthcare robotic system is data communication over networks without performance guarantee. This paper proposes a novel way of using auditory feedback as the substitute for visual feedback to ensure that the telerobotic remote health monitoring system still functions in a real-time fashion under the unfavorable communication conditions, such as image losses, visual failures and low-bandwidth communication links. The newly proposed method is tested through psychoacoustic experiments with ten subjects conducting real-time robotic navigation tasks. The experimental results suggest that the feasibility of the proposed the method.