Interactive Health Care Robot to Measure Vital Signs

In order to maintain the health of aged people living in care facilities, care staffs need to check the vital conditions of the residents frequently. For the facility staffs, however, taking vital signals of residents is one of the time-consuming tasks, and the operation is strongly expected to be supported by modern robot technologies. In this study, we propose an interactive health care robot that measures vital signals of residents. In this interactive vital measurement, the health care robot gently approaches a resident and operates its arm to reach the resident's hand. The robot then interactively requests the resident to grab the haptic vital handle. The novelty of our method is in the design of human-robot interaction. On the surface of the haptic vital handle, the vital sensors and pressure sensors are arrayed in order to detect physical gripping. The vital signals of the blood oxygen saturation and heart rate are recorded only when the robot is detecting pressure patterns and confident of the hand gripping. This mechanism allows the open contact measuring without clipping resident's fingers. We performed experiments to measure vital and pressure signals from healthy adults and evaluated the reliability of the measurement in the different configurations of the body postures denoted as the stance, on-chair, on-wheelchair, and on-bed.