A Medical Assistive Robot for Telehealth Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development and Usability Study in an Isolation Ward

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the mental and emotional well-being of patients, family members, and health care workers. Patients in the isolation ward may have psychological problems due to long-term hospitalization, the development of the epidemic, and the inability to see their families. A medical assistive robot (MAR), acting as an intermediary of communication, can be deployed to address these mental pressures. OBJECTIVE: CareDo, a MAR with telepresence and teleoperation functions, was developed in this work for remote health care. The aim of this study was to investigate its practical performance in the isolation ward during the pandemic. METHODS: Two systems were integrated into the CareDo robot. For the telepresence system, a web real-time communications solution is used for the multiuser chat system and a convolutional neural network is used for expression recognition. For the teleoperation system, an incremental motion mapping method is used for operating the robot remotely. A clinical trial of this system was conducted at First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University. RESULTS: During the clinical trials, tasks such as video chatting, emotion detection, and medical supplies delivery were performed via the CareDo robot. Seven voice commands were set for performing system wakeup, video chatting, and system exiting. Durations from 1 to 3 seconds of common commands were set to improve voice command detection. The facial expression was recorded 152 times for a patient in 1 day for the psychological intervention. The recognition accuracy reached 95% and 92.8% for happy and neutral expressions, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Patients and health care workers can use this MAR in the isolation ward for telehealth care during the COVID-19 pandemic. This can be a useful approach to break the chains of virus transmission and can also be an effective way to conduct remote psychological intervention.