A Framework of IoT Platform for Autonomous Mobile Robot in Hospital Logistics Applications

Abstract

Hospital Logistics deals with effective and efficient ways to transport items in hospitals. Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) is one of the most widely used automated systems to improve the transportation process. In this research, AMRs are used for delivering food and medical supplies to individual patients. Especially in COVID-19 pandemic situation, AMRs are important tools for keeping physical distance between patients and health workers to prevent infection. In this research, the AMR is equipped with Internet of Things (IoT) module which can be connected to the IoT platform on the server side. As a result, the health workers are able to monitor can control the robots effectively via a web application.

A systematic review of collaborative robots for nurses: where are we now, and where is the evidence?

“…The 28 selected articles were written by authors who either developed their own unique cobot platforms (n = 22), or authors who used off-the-shelf cobots, including Pepper ( n = 3), Nao ( n = 3), (see “Cobots used?” columns in Table 3 ). Six studies included came from similar authors/research teams, using the same or very similar cobotic platforms including two studies based in the United States ( Dalal et al, 2018 ; Lundberg et al, 2022 ), two based in Thailand ( Thamrongaphichartkul et al, 2020 ; Vongbunyong et al, 2021 ) and two based in the Netherlands ( Boumans et al, 2018 ; Boumans et al, 2019 - see rows in gray in Table 3 ). We decided to include these works from similar authors due to the fact that discovering commitment to continuous study is itself a finding from our review, and a table summarizing the overlap is presented within the Supplementary Material .…”

“…Any other type of cobot that the article did not specify the type, or is a novel cobot designed by the research authors, or even a third-party design that is not any of the aforementioned three is classified as a unique design ( n = 20). Examples of unique design cobots include “Lio”, a personal cobot assistant for routine tasks such as blood sample collection or mail delivery ( Mišeikis et al, 2020 ), “Carver-Cap” cobot cart for logistics ( Thamrongaphichartkul et al, 2020 ; Vongbunyong et al, 2021 ), adaptive cobotic nursing assistant (ARNA) platform for fetching objects for nurses and measuring patients’ temperatures ( Lundberg et al, 2022 ), “ISOLDE”, a multimodal interactive mobile cobot for thermal measurement, and delivery of medicine and other object essential items ( Virgolin et al, 2021 ), a social cobot used adapted for collecting patient-reported outcome measurement ( Boumans et al, 2018 ; 2019 ) to mention a few (see “Cobots used” columns in Table 3 ; Supplementary Figures S1 for pictures of other cobot products).…”

“…All social support cobots ( n = 6), and 75% of the elder care and/or memory support cobot ( n = 3) were near the patients. Cobots that are roaming freely in the healthcare facilities ( n = 13; Thamrongaphichartkul et al, 2020 ; Oishi et al, 2021 ) are majorly assisting nurses work ( n = 9) such as a cobotic cart ( Konara et al, 2020 ) for medication delivery, Carver-Cap cobot for logistics ( Thamrongaphichartkul et al, 2020 ), mobile personal robot 2 (PR2), and adaptive cobotic nursing assistant (ARNA) platform for fetching objects for nurses and measuring patients’ temperatures ( Dalal et al, 2018 ; Abubakar et al, 2020 ; Lundberg et al, 2022 ) to mention a few, while three studies did not report the location of the cobots ( He et al, 2019 ; Toney et al, 2022 ; Sun et al, 2023 ; see “Cobot location” columns in Table 3 ).…”

Scalable and heterogenous mobile robot fleet-based task automation in crowded hospital environments—a field test

“…The main emphasis of RMF is on scalability both in terms of integrating robotic fleets from different vendors, and managing a growing fleet, i.e., avoiding traffic congestions and giving way to robots with a high priority task. Despite the significant amount of robotic fleet management efforts reported in the literature [ Ortiz et al (2021) ; Thiel et al (2009) ; Thamrongaphichartkul et al (2020) ], RMF uniquely remains as an actively maintained open-source and scalable fleet management system with a growing user community.…”

Multi-Objective Multi-Learner Robot Trajectory Prediction Method for IoT Mobile Robot Systems

“…Mobile robots are one of the most important parts of the IoT system, which are capable of being automatic sensing nodes [1,2], flexible transportation carriers [3], or effective execution tools [4]. With the development of IoT technologies, the requirements for the stability of the mobile robot system are getting higher and higher [5].…”