Abstract
According to the World Health Organization 1, 2 the percentage of healthcare dependent population, such as elderly and people with disabilities, among others, will increase over the next years. This trend will put a strain on the health and social systems of most countries. The adoption of robots could assist these health systems in responding to this increased demand, particularly in high intensity and repetitive tasks. In a previous work, we compared a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) with a Virtual Agent (VA) during the execution of a rehabilitation task. The SAR consisted of a humanoid R1 robot, while the Virtual Agent represented its simulated counter-part. In both cases, the agents evaluated the participants’ motions and provided verbal feedback. Participants reported higher levels of engagement when training with the SAR. Given that the architecture has been proven to be successful for a rehabilitation task, other sets of repetitive tasks could also take advantage of the platform, such as clinical tests. A commonly performed clinical trial is the Timed Up and Go (TUG), where the patient has to stand up, walk 3 m to a goal line and back, and sit down. To handle this test, we extended the architecture to evaluate lower limbs’ motions, follow the participants while continuously interacting with them, and verify that the test is completed successfully. We implemented the scenario in Gazebo, by simulating both participants and the interaction with the robot 3 . A full interactive report is created when the test is over, providing the extracted information to the specialist. We validate the architecture in three different experiments, each with 1,000 trials, using the Gazebo simulation. These experiments evaluate the ability of this architecture to analyse the patient, verify if they are able to complete the TUG test, and the accuracy of the measurements obtained during the test. This work provides the foundations towards more thorough clinical experiments with a large number of participants with a physical platform in the future. The software is publicly available in the assistive-rehab repository 4 and fully documented.
Highlights
According to the World Health Organization (WHO)5,6 (WHO, 2015), the percentage of healthcare dependent population, such as elderly and people with disabilities, among others, will increase over the years
In this paper we propose a solution by using robots to assist medical professionals when realizing repetitive and monotonous exams, in particular for the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test
With this paper we aim to introduce a robotic solution for the increasing strain on healthcare systems, allowing repetitive tests and exams to be handled by a robot platform, removing some of the pressure from the medical professionals, preventing errors due to exhaustion and stress, and maintaining consistency over time and across patients
Summary
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) (WHO, 2015), the percentage of healthcare dependent population, such as elderly and people with disabilities, among others, will increase over the years. First world countries, are faced with an increasingly higher percentage of people in need of healthcare assistance, either due to old age or some disabilities or impairments, requiring prolonged care, constant examination, and following up the patients very closely This pressure, both in number of and time dedicated to the patients, will put a strain on the current healthcare and social systems all over the world. In this paper we propose a solution by using robots to assist medical professionals when realizing repetitive and monotonous exams, in particular for the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test The implementation of such a system would remove some of the workload from the medical professional, and be more reliable in the long run, not suffering from attention, exhaustion or other issues that often affect us. With this system we intend to show the possibility of using robot platforms in this context, paving the way for further development and implementation of such platforms in hospitals and other healthcare facilities
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