Autonomous wheelchair for patient’s transportation on healthcare institutions

摘要

The transport of patients from the inpatient service to the operating room is a recurrent task in a hospital routine. This taskis repetitive, non-ergonomic, time consuming, and requires the labor of patient transporters. In this paper is presenteda system, named Connected Driverless Wheelchair, that can receive transportation requests directly from the hospitalinformation management system, pick up patients at their beds, navigate autonomously through different floors, avoidobstacles, communicate with elevators, and drop patients off at the designated operating room. As a result, a prototypecapable of transporting patients autonomously in hospital environments was obtained. Although it was impossible totest the final developed system at the hospital as planned, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the extensive tests conductedat the robotics laboratory facilities, and our previous experience in integrating mobile robots in hospitals, allowed toconclude that it is perfectly prepared for this integration to be carried out. The achieved results are relevant since this is asystem that may be applied to support these types of tasks in the future, making the transport of patients more efficient(both from a cost and time perspective), without unpredictable delays and, in some cases, safer.