Intuitive, Efficient and Ergonomic Tele-Nursing Robot Interfaces: Design Evaluation and Evolution

Abstract

Tele-nursing robots provide a safe approach for patient-caring in quarantine areas. For effective nurse–robot collaboration, ergonomic teleoperation and intuitive interfaces with low physical and cognitive workload must be developed. We propose a framework to evaluate the control interfaces to iteratively develop an intuitive, efficient, and ergonomic teleoperation interface. The framework is a hierarchical procedure that incorporates general to specific assessment and its role in design evolution. We first present pre-defined objective and subjective metrics used to evaluate three representative contemporary teleoperation interfaces. The results indicate that teleoperation via human motion mapping outperforms the gamepad and stylus interfaces. The tradeoff with using motion mapping as a teleoperation interface is the non-trivial physical fatigue. To understand the impact of heavy physical demand during motion mapping teleoperation, we propose an objective assessment of physical workload in teleoperation using electromyography. We find that physical fatigue happens in the actions that involve precise manipulation and steady posture maintenance. We further implemented teleoperation assistance in the form of shared autonomy to eliminate the fatigue-causing component in robot teleoperation via motion mapping. The experimental results show that the autonomous feature effectively reduces the physical effort while improving the efficiency and accuracy of the teleoperation interface.