Handling of emergency situations with elderly patients using autonomous mobile robot and smart tablets

Abstract

Knowing the up-to-date situation about the emergency environment and collaboration between the caregiver staff can be very useful in properly executing the rescue operations, especially in cases of elderly patients. The current advancements in the mobile autonomous robots and smart mobile devices (such as tablets) could provide better means to caregiver staff in handling these emergency situations more effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we present an overall solution to facilitate the caregiver staff to collaborate each other and interact with the elderly person in an emergency situation alone at home for properly executing the rescue operation. For this, we use a mobile app on smart tablet devices to make collaboration between the mobile Emergency Response Teams (ERTs) and the staff at central Health Service Center (HSC). Further, we provide communication mediums to facilitate the HSC and the ERTs to access and control over the robot in order to know the current situation of the emergency environment. We have performed a user evaluation study to check the usability of the developed mobile app. Results of the study indicate approximately the same accuracy and efficiency with users having no prior experience or training compared to experts users.