Robotic Healthcare Service System to Serve Multiple Patients with Multiple Robots

This paper presents a robot system for a healthcare environment, especially for a family doctor practice. The robot system includes a sensor manager and a robot system for a general doctor’s practice, which enables multiple robots to serve multiple patients at one time, by sharing vital signs devices. A receptionist robot assigns one patient to one nurse assistant robot using a patient identification system. Our previous work included three subsystems: a receptionist robot, a nurse assistant robot, and a medical server. However, this could only serve one patient and one vital signs device at any one time, which means we can use only one of vital signs devices prepared for patients and wastes their time waiting. In addition, patients should enter their identification data to robot by themselves, which takes another long time as well as can make errors on the data. We implemented the new system with multiple robots and new patient identification system using QR code, and did a pilot study to confirm the new system’s functionalities. The results show the new system talks well with multiple robots to support multiple patients by identifying them using QR codes, and measures their vital signs well by sharing the devices.