Adventures in telepsychiatry

In “Telepsychiatry: What’s lost?, Part one,”  I said that one advantage of a face-to-face visit over telepsychiatry was that some of the visual information gets lost through a webcam. When I’m face to face with someone, I can take a quick glance at their hands and look for a tremor. I can’t do that with a webcam because, at least for the ones I’m using, I can’t control where they point.

I still can’t see an easy way to get around this problem, but I did notice something this week that made a difference to how I’ve set up the webcam I use with Skype.

I was having a Skype conversation with the parent of a patient, and I noticed that the video I was getting from his side clearly was using some face-tracking software because whenever he moved his head, the camera would tilt, pan and zoom to keep his face in roughly the center of the picture.

When I installed my Logitech webcams,  I did what I suspect most other people do—I just ran the install CDROM , got to work, and never read any of the documentation.

What I didn’t notice when I installed the webcams were all the special bells and whistles that Logitech provides. I clicked on the Logitech icon in the System tray, looked under Camera Settings, found an item for Face Tracking and checked the box. Voila! Now the camera not only follows my face when I move around but it zooms in on it too.

Not a gigantic improvement, but I (and my next Skype patient) thought it made a noticeable positive contribution. The only problem with it is that the face tracking software gets a bit confused if I move my hands around in front of the camera—it looks to me like the face-tracking software isn’t that sophisticated just yet, but it certainly works well enough to be more of a help than a hinderance.

Another problem is that although I used Windows at my practice, I tend to use Ubuntu Linux on all my other computers and the Linux drivers don’t support the face-tracking yet. It’s hard for me to imagine that the face tracking is built into the camera’s firmware. I would suspect it is in the driver software that interfaces the camera to the operating system, but I’m not really sure. I hope someone in the Linux world is working on this problem….