Towards a Multi-purpose Robotic Nursing Assistant

TL;DR

This paper introduces MINA, a versatile robotic nursing assistant capable of aiding patients and nurses, featuring teleoperation and walking assistance, with preliminary results showing improved performance and an intuitive GUI.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-purpose robotic system that combines patient assistance and teleoperation, addressing the need for versatile nursing robots especially during pandemics.

Findings

Improved walking assistance performance over existing methods.

Development of an intuitive GUI for teleoperation.

Preliminary positive results demonstrating system capabilities.

Abstract

Robotic nursing aid is one of the heavily researched areas in robotics nowadays. Several robotic assistants exist that only focus on a specific function related to nurses assistance or functions related to patient aid. There is a need for a unified system that not only performs tasks that would assist nurses and reduce their burden but also perform tasks that help a patient. In recent times, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is also an increase in the need for robotic assistants that have teleoperation capabilities to provide better protection against the virus spread. To address these requirements, we propose a novel Multi-purpose Intelligent Nurse Aid (MINA) robotic system that is capable of providing walking assistance to the patients and perform teleoperation tasks with an easy-to-use and intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI). This paper also presents preliminary results from the walking assistant task that improves upon the current state-of-the-art methods and shows the developed GUI for teleoperation.