Automated patient localization in challenging hospital environments

Telehealth adoption accelerated in the past few years. Telehealth can be offered via simple video consultations or in more complex environments with doctors remotely assisting an operation or remote intensive care unit (ICU) support through a video feed. In these complex settings, it is essential for the doctors joining remotely to understand the remote environment quickly. The most critical information is identifying the patient’s location, which may not be immediately apparent in an operating room or ICU busy with equipment and other clinicians. In this paper, we trained object detection models to find the bounding box of patients in such complex hospital environments using a relatively small number of images (for an object detection task) from standard video cameras without depth or other information beyond a regular image. The best model achieves a high precision-recall area under the curve for this task, even when trained with a small dataset. We describe the process to identify the best model, considerations to deploy the model, and suggest improvements for future work.