Human-Care Rounds Robot with Contactless Breathing Measurement

Abstract

This paper describes a human measurement system for autonomous rounds robot aiming in physical support of care staffs working in nursing and medical facilities. We propose a novel scheme of vision-based contactless breathing measurement system that integrates three-dimensional shape and thermal information of the target person. We developed the human-care rounds robot Lucia and implemented the measurement system on the robot. We then evaluated the human detection and breathing measurement based on the conditions of real incident cases that occurred in the nursing facility for the physically handicapped. In the experiments, we examined that the breathing measurement system successfully measured volume variation of human subjects with different configurations of body postures. The robot is also capable of discrimination between the breathing and non-breathing states of targets based on the difference in the power spectrum patterns in the frequency domain. The experimental results showed that the proposed system detected the presence of breathing within the accuracy of about 90% or more, and moreover, the ability of anomaly detection in breathing was suggested.