Potentials of a Tactile Interface for Diagnostic Support in Dermatological Telemedicine

The rapid digitization in the healthcare sector has led to the new field of telemedicine. This branch offers great opportunities, especially in view of the past corona pandemic, to improve treatment processes, relieve consultation hours and thus enable patients to be diagnosed and treated more easily and quickly. In the field of dermatology, many new services are emerging that use images to make convenient online diagnoses. However, sources show that 2D data is not always sufficient for a comprehensive diagnosis. This paper therefore aims to investigate the extent to which tactile interfaces, in this case an ultrasonic board, are suitable for enabling a tactile diagnosis via haptic feedback and thus providing more precise treatment. A prototype ultrasonic board was built for this purpose. Together with dermatologists, a catalog of requirements for a remote diagnosis was developed, which was incorporated into a test concept to evaluate the detection limits of the ultrasonic board. Based on the test results, a final statement is made about the general potential of the approach for the use in teledermatology.