Sahayantra - A Patient Assistance Robot

Abstract

COVID-19 has brought to light the shortfall of nurses in India. Lack of Personal Protective Equipment(PPE) and long working hours are some of the problems faced by the nurses. To lessen the risk of exposure and reduce the burden on nurses, hospitals can adopt medical assistance robots. In this work, a cost-effective patient assistance robot Sahayantra is proposed. It can deliver objects to the patient, remind them to take medicines, and send notifications on an emergency. A Raspberry Pi based system takes speech input from the patient and employs object detection and tracking using TensorFlow lite to find the desired object. The goal is to provide a convenient and cost-effective robot that is capable of helping the patients in their day to day activities. The functionalities of Sahayantra are tested against varied environments and with different objects. It is found to be a reliable and compact solution for patient assistance in hospitals and homes.