ARIS 1.0: An Autonomous Multitasking Medical Service Robot for Hospital Environments

Introducing robotics in the healthcare sector revolutionizes medical services by providing advanced treatments, medication management, and robotic assistance while overcoming resource limitations. In the current healthcare domain, an intermediate robotic communication platform is essential for distributing equal medical services, facilitating remote consultations, and maintaining the integrity of medical education, especially in rural areas and during pandemics. This work introduces ARIS, a multitasking medical service robot designed for telemedicine aspects and to facilitate remote medical education activities such as ward rounds. The prototype called ARIS 1.0 was developed, including a three-wheeled omnidirectional mobile platform, a torso and a novel movable neck mechanism with a face. The prototype robot can generate an online summarized report using its integrated language interaction and IoT-based vital sign extraction modules. The ROS-based semi-autonomous navigation facilitates the robot to be an assistive agent, allowing it to either accompany doctors or visit patients individually. Ultimately, ARIS 1.0 serves telepresence and novel regional language capabilities, specifically Sinhala-based self-communication features. This enables inter-party communication among doctors, medical students, and patients. The functionalities of ARIS 1.0 were validated in an emulated indoor environment to evaluate their feasibility. The results indicate that ARIS 1.0 is feasible for providing remote medical services. Furthermore, the paper discusses several promising research directions related to the proposed concept.