AUTONOMOUS MOBILE ROBOT FOR TRANSPORTING WHEELCHAIRS IN HEALTHCARE INSTITUTIONS

• Autor(a) principal: Faria, João Pedro Moreira
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/11110/2738
• topic: Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR); transportation; manual wheelchair; Management of Health Institutions

Currently, much of the world has seen a rapid increase in the elderly population, a growing shortage of nurses, and a low ratio of doctors per patients, causing several issues in the healthcare sector. In this sense, in recent decades there has been a concern to provide automated solutions to support health professionals in hospitals. With the current advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, robots have great potential to help in this sector. In healthcare institutions, patient transport is a recurrent, repetitive, time-consuming, non-ergonomic task that requires the support of a technical assistant. Besides there are problems such as the lack of assistants to perform the transport, forcing health professionals to perform this task, this type of task can lead to several problems, including musculoskeletal disorders. Thus, the objective of this study is to propose a system to manage the transport of wheelchairs with AMRs for healthcare institutions. In the first phase, the transportation management software was developed, composed of the application that allows to request transports, the AMRs transporters, and the fleet management software that associates the transport to the closest and fastest robot to the starting point. The second phase consists of the sizing and design of the wheelchair-carrying AMR, presenting three possible robot concepts. A white cane was added to the platforms to allow guiding blind people around the institution and as a result of its structural characteristics, the robot allows logistic transportation. The experiments carried out show that the transport management system has great potential to assist healthcare professionals and the transport platform solutions as robust and versatile. Overall, the proposed transport management system is very promising, automating a repetitive and time-consuming process and reducing the workload for healthcare professionals.