Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is affecting the mental and emotional well-being of patients, family members, and healthcare workers. Patients in the isolation ward may have psychological problems due to long-term hospitalization, the development of the epidemic, and the inability to meet their families. The medical assistive robot (MAR), acting as an intermediary of communication, can be deployed to address mental pressures. CareDo, a MAR with telepresence and teleoperation functions, is developed in this work for remote healthcare. This study aims to investigate its practical performance in the isolation ward during the pandemic. Two systems were integrated into the CareDo robot. For the telepresence system, web real-time communications solution is used for the multi-user chat system and the convolutional neural network is used for expression recognition. For the teleoperation system, an incremental motion mapping method is used for operating the robot remotely. This study was finally conducted at the First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University for clinical trials. During the clinical trials in First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University, tasks such as video chatting, emotion detection, and medical supplies delivery are performed through this robot. Seven voice commands are set for performing system wakeup, video chatting, and system exiting. Statistical durations from 1 second to 3 seconds of common commands are set to improve voice command detection. The facial expression was recorded 152 times for a patient in one day for the psychological intervention. The recognition accuracy reaches 95% and 92.8% for happy and neutral expressions respectively. Patients and healthcare workers can use this MAR in the isolation ward for tele-healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be a useful approach to break the chains of virus transmission, and also an effective way for remote psychological intervention.
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