Autonomous Bot Assistant in Covid-19 Patient Isolation Wards

Objective: In the current coronavirus situation around the globe, there are many challenges in front of the doctors & health workers carrying out their duty in hospitals/isolation wards. The direct contact with affected patients despite ensuring safety measures has led to the loss of many lives of the frontline workers. Thus, it is valuable to design an autonomous robot system that can fulfill daily chores in the isolation ward. Method: In this paper, we design a robotic system to fulfill the daily requirements of a patient such as delivering meals & medicines, also it can collect health stats such as SPO2 & body temperature. The robot traces a line that leads it to the beds in the isolation ward, an RFID tag reader is installed on the robot that detects the RFID cards placed on the bed. Then the robot conveys the patients through the display to place a finger on the SPO2 sensor & temperature sensor, this recorded data is instantly stored through ESP8266 on a ThingSpeak server in the patient's database. Results: The robot can achieve its objective, with exact blood oxygen saturation readings & approximate body temperature reading. The daily meals & medicines are delivered in a package having a label of bed number on it. Conclusions: This study contributes the first cost-effective robot with a combination of unique features in a total project cost of INR 7000(approx. $95USD). The routine work of health workers is replaced alternatively by an autonomous robot, thus preventing direct contact with patients.