RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Remote consultations that are realistic enough to be useful medically offer considerable clinical, logistical and cost benefits. Despite advances in virtual reality and vision hardware and software, these benefits are currently often unrealised. METHOD: The proposed approach combines high spatial and temporal resolution 3D and 2D machine vision with virtual reality techniques, in order to develop new environments and instruments that will enable realistic remote consultations and the generation of new types of useful clinical data. RESULTS: New types of clinical data have been generated for skin analysis and respiration measurement; and the combination of 3D with 2D data was found to offer potential for the generation of realistic virtual consultations. CONCLUSION: An innovative combination of high resolution machine vision data and virtual reality online methods, promises to provide advanced functionality and significant medical benefits, particularly in regions where populations are dispersed or access to clinicians is limited. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.