Motivation & Goals

Natural language can be temporarily or permanently lost due to a disease, an accident or after an operation and has a significant impact on the everyday communication of affected patients.

Training of clinical assessments as well as patient communication is nowadays performed with affected patients or with specially trained acting patients. Training on affected patients can lead to increased stress or discomfort for patients. Acting patients, on the other hand, are unfortunately rare and generate high costs.A simulated training environment is developed using an android robot patient to provide family members and medical staff with a risk-free and safe training environment for clinical assessments and everyday communication. For this purpose, individual, reproducible behavioral patterns of nonverbal communication and social interaction schemes are transferred to the android robot patient and reproduced.

Approach

In this project, modern measurement methods will be used to record individual or disease-specific movement and behavior patterns of patients. The goal of the project is to bring an android robot patient "to life" by using the acquired sensory recordings of movement and behavior patterns, which will be used for the education and training of medical staff, especially for the training of clinical assessment. The use of expert knowledge and the use of the android robot patient will allow a flexible and safe training space with a high degree of individuality and reality (individual behavior of patients). Thus, the training of specific clinical assessments or everyday non-verbal communication can take place optimally in the context of intensive care.

• Röhl, J. H., Klausen, A. D., Feldmann, N., Diekmann, R., Hellmers, S., Günther, U., & Hein, A. (2023, June). Android Robot-Patient for Teaching and Training of Delirium Assessment Instruments: A Pilot Study. In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts (ARSO) (pp. 78-83). IEEE.
• Röhl, J. H., Hellmers, S., Diekmann, R., & Hein, A. (2022, August). Concept of an Observation-driven Android Robot-Patient with individualised Communication Skills. In 2022 9th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference for Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob) (pp. 1-7). IEEE.