Robot Patient Design to Simulate Various Patients for Transfer Training

Abstract

To improve the patient transfer skill of nursing education students, we developed a robot patient that can simulate three categories of patients: 1) patients whose movements are affected by paralysis; 2) patients whose movements are sensitive to pain with painful expression; and 3) patients whose movements are constrained by medical devices. By practicing with the robot patient, nursing students can learn the skills required for interacting with various patients. To simulate trunk movements of these different patients, novel waist and hip joints with hardware-inherent compliance and force-sensing capability were proposed. In addition, control methods were developed and the parameters were tuned based on actual patient videos. To evaluate the developed robot, nursing teachers performed trials of transferring the robot patient as they would transfer an actual patient. The nursing teachers scored the robot patients based on a checklist. Moreover, subjective evaluations of a questionnaire were performed by the nursing teachers. The results showed that the nursing teachers performed most of the required skills of the checklist and agreed regarding the learning effectiveness of the robot. They recommended training nursing students using the robot patient in the questionnaire. Finally, hugging speed comparison showed that the nurses slow down the speed when dealing with a robot patient with painful expression.