A Social Robot for Autonomous Health Data Acquisition Among Hospitalized Patients: An Exploratory Field Study

Abstract

The current attention on quality monitoring instruments for hospitalized patients imposes a high data registration workload on nurses. The focus of our research was to investigate whether a social robot is able to take over some of this data collection by administering questionnaires autonomously. We performed an exploratory design experiment on the internal medicine ward of the Franciscus Gasthuis & Vlietland hospital. 35 patients (mean age 64.1±17.7, 20 female) participated in the study. We used the social robot Pepper to conduct five questionnaires on medical history, defecation, pain, memory and sleep. Patients and nurses found the robot reasonably acceptable in this role. Further research is needed to address concerns and optimize the nurse-robot task division.