Motorized Percussion: A comparative Evaluation to Foster Telemedicine

Abstract

Purpose The demand for telemedicine is continuously increasing. However, many medical examination techniques such as auscultation are based on manual execution and subjective assessment by each individual doctor. For the increasing trend of telemedicine, we have developed an electric percussion device that examines in a standardized way. Methods This study evaluated the new approach of using motorized percussion against the gold standard of manual percussion. An examination was carried out on a healthy volunteer using both techniques. Thereby, occurring sounds from both pulmonary and non-pulmonary areas were recorded as the primary goal of percussion is to assess the size of the lung. Recordings were cut into individual samples and randomized within each examination variant. Results When discriminating between ventral and dorsal, and manual and motorized percussion, the outcome of the 28-participant anonymous survey showed that the noisesuppressed ventral motorized percussion with 93.2% (10.2) correctly identified percussion points surpassed all other conducted percussion techniques. Conclusion Making a distinction between pulmonary volume and exterior areas is very reliable with the motorized percussion. In order to be able to describe the clinical picture precisely in the future, further evaluations are necessary.

Keywords

• percussion · auscultation · telemedicine · telediagnostics · clinical examination