Heterogeneous Robot-Assisted Services in Isolation Wards: A System Development and Usability Study

Abstract

Isolation wards operate in quarantine rooms to prevent cross-contamination caused by infectious diseases. Behind the benefits, medical personnel can have the infection risk from patients and the heavy workload due to the isolation. This work proposes a robot-assisted system to alleviate these problems in isolation wards. We conducted a survey about the medical staff's difficulties and envisioning robots. Using the investigation result, we devised three valuable services using two kinds of heterogeneous robots: telemedicine, emergency alert, and delivery services by care robots and delivery robots. Our system also provides user-interactive components such as a dashboard for medical staff and a patient app for inpatients. To manage the services efficiently, we suggest the robotic system based on a central control server and a hierarchical management architecture. Through a user study, we reviewed the usability of the developed system and its future directions.