OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Limited, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., and the Kitasato Institute's Kitasato University Oriental Medicine Research Center (below, Oriental Medicine Research Center) today announced that they have collaborated in the development of a new glove-type touch sensor that captures touch data when a Kampo(1) doctor palpates a patient.

Kampo doctors frequently use palpation to understand the body's condition and signs of illnesses. Because this process is based on the doctor's own knowledge and experience, it has been difficult to produce data on the process that would help other doctors objectively understand the basis for a diagnosis.

In this newly developed technology, a flexible, thin-film pressure sensor has been made that does not cause any loss of sensitivity when used in an examination. Sensors are fitted to the finger pads and measure sensory information as pressure data when the doctor touches the patient during a palpation. Tying this to the track that the doctor’s hands follow quantifies the touches so that they can be recorded as data. This will make it possible to amass data on palpations by Kampo doctors and look at them objectively to help doctors with future diagnoses, and will contribute to the discovery of sub-health(2).

Part of this project was developed under Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology's The Center of Innovation (COI) Program (COI Stream), promoted by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, under the program title "Research and Development on Mibyou Control System Using Safe and High Quality Kampo Medicine and Information and Communication Technology."

This development is being presented at the IEEE.International Conference on Sensing Technology 2015 (ICST 2015), which opened December 8 in Aukland, New Zealand.

An important aspect of Kampo is to promote a long, healthy life in which everyday activities are not restricted by discovering conditions that may lead to illness before they actually manifest as illness, and deal with them at that level. Kampo doctors can detect sub-health conditions - that would not be diagnosed as illnesses in Western medicine - before symptoms appear. But the diagnostic standards in Kampo - which are based on interviews, taking pulses, examining tongues, and palpating the abdomen - often rely on the practitioner's subjective impressions, and have never been defined.