Assistant Delivery Robot for Nursing Home using ROS: Robotic prototype for medicine delivery and vital signs registration

Abstract

The number of older people is increasing rapidly in Mexico, and the projections estimate that this number will continuing growing in the next years. Furthermore, a considerable percentage of this sector of the population suffers some type of chronic illness and thus, have a complex medication regime to follow. Providing them their medication on time and monitoring their vital signs are essential tasks for the proper care of older adults in a nursing home. The main idea of this paper is proposing an assistant delivery robotic prototype for nursing homes capable of helping caregivers to deliver medications to inhabitants based on schedules configured via a graphical user interface. In addition, a function for vital signs registration for remote monitoring via an IoT dashboard is also proposed. The prototype is implemented using a TurtleBot3 as the main hardware platform and Robot Operating System as the framework to program the software.