ROBOTS AS "CO-WORKERS" IN HEALTHCARE

Robots as "Co-workers" in Healthcare

Robots as "Co-workers" in Healthcare

Introduction

Robotics in healthcare aims the provision of a grade of autonomy or a service to people that permanently or temporally lost part of their physical or mental abilities. It might be the case that these people need to interact with the robot in order to get the service required. From another point of view, Robotics in healthcare aims at assisting or releasing the care giving staff in/from certain tasks in a hospital environment or in institutional care. Such a robot may be operated or commanded by a nurse to do some standard tasks or by a patient who seeks assistance usually provided by a nurse or care giving person.

The robot in healthcare is used as a service robot and economic reasons may be the driving factor for its application. More specifically, robotics in rehabilitation aims at providing people with a tool that (partially) compensates their disabilities, In this application, the robot is not a service provider but a tool that increases user's abilities to perform certain tasks and, By this, re-activates the disabled person. Social rehabilitation, as well as increment of personal independence and quality of life are the main objectives of rehabilitation robotics. According to these differing objectives, the application areas “health care” and rehabilitation” are treated separately in the following although a significant number of the requirements arc identical for both application areas and arc described from the “users' perspective”.

Body: Discussion and Analysis

There are no well-known well-defined user requirements for autonomous mobile service robots in hospital/rehabilitation environment that are based on long-term experiences because of the rarity of such systems. Some hospitals use guided mobile systems for transportation of meals or cloths, E.g. HelpMate' by 'HelpMate Robotics Inc. However, these are not equipped with a robot arm. Therefore the process of user needs analysis has to be quite interactive and incremental starting with presenting the researchers' ideas of autonomous mobile service robots to potential users and showing some potential capabilities of such systems.

From this point, users can start to think about tasks to be performed by a service robot. One thing should be clear: Hospitals etc. are organized in such a way that human care givers or service personnel are able to perform all typical tasks. Therefore service robots cannot be expected to be a must” for such establishments in the sense that they tasks that human beings are not able to . Potential benefits of service robots can mainly be expected to be economic and practical on one hand, and to contribute to quality of life for disabled users on the other hand.

Current development of mobile robotics capitalizes on the huge progress during the last decade of industrial robotics technology, open promising prospects of application in the medical field. Nevertheless, designing robotic systems to assist people with special needs e.g. the motor disabled individuals requires a good knowledge of the context within which they Will have to ...