User Requirements for a Robot Teleoperation system for General Medical Examination

Thailand, as well as many other countries world-wide, is facing a shortage of medical staff. We purpose a solution to improve medical services in health centres: a robot teleoperation system to allow patients to consult with doctors from public hospitals, and for doctors to examine and make decisions about their required care. To develop such a system, a user-centred design (UCD) process is followed. Here we present an important first step in this process to establish user requirements for such a system. Hence, we have conducted a focus group with Thai medical staff from Banphaeo General Hospital and an online survey with potential patients. An online collaborative board has been setup to facilitate running the focus group virtually and provide an effective tool to gather data. A qualitative data is then analysed using a framework analysis. Based on this work, we present a list of user requirements for doctors, patients and assistants and discuss how the collected requirements can be transferred into technical specifications of the system. Our study found that communication among different user groups is the most important requirement.