Telepresence Robotics Applied to Transport, Monitoring and Assisting People with Disabilities

Robotics has more and more applications in medicine, from surgical operations to patient transport.Existing robotic applications are analyzed, useful for transporting and assisting immobilized patients. We studied how we can adapt them to the needs of modern medicine and healthcare, transforming them into telepresence robots capable of both transporting and assisting the patient autonomously. The prosed solutions allow the medical team to communicate directly with it and have real-time access to vital functions data.Two new application models are proposed: a walking chair and a controllable robotic plate via a mobile application, via direct WI-FI. A prototype of the robotized stretcher, made in miniature, had the role of helping us analyze the actual functioning of the proposed model, using for the remote control, a WI-FI connection is also proposed. The mathematical model of wheel speeds is developed, which helps to design the digital curvature control elements, as well as the software diagrams designed for robot control. The realization and effective testing of the prototype observed a good response to orders observed on a distance of about 50 meters. The range of the proposed model is relatively small for a hospital stretcher that will have to transmit and receive data and controls in real time. Therefore, as a future research direction we consider to test a WI-FI connection through the Internet.