A Direct Physical Interface for Navigation and Positioning of a Robotic Nursing Assistant

People often use direct physical contact to guide a person to a desired location (e.g., leading a child by the hand) or to adjust a person's posture for a task (e.g., a dance instructor working with a dancer). When a user is in close proximity to a robot, physical contact becomes a potentially...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAdvanced robotics Vol. 25; no. 5; pp. 605 - 627
Main Authors Chen, Tiffany L., Kemp, Charles C.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Taylor & Francis Group 01.01.2011
Subjects
Channels
Contact
Contact potentials
DIRECT PHYSICAL INTERFACE
HEALTHCARE ROBOTICS
HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION
Navigation
Nurses
NURSING
Robotics
Robots
Tasks
USER STUDY
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Summary:People often use direct physical contact to guide a person to a desired location (e.g., leading a child by the hand) or to adjust a person's posture for a task (e.g., a dance instructor working with a dancer). When a user is in close proximity to a robot, physical contact becomes a potentially valuable channel for communication. We define a direct physical interface (DPI) as an interface that enables a user to influence a robot's behavior by making contact with its body. We evaluated a DPI in a controlled laboratory setting with 18 nurses and compared its performance with that of a comparable gamepad interface. The DPI significantly outperformed the gamepad according to several objective and subjective measures. Nurses also tended to exert more force at the robot's end-effectors and command higher velocities when using the DPI to perform a navigation task compared with using the DPI to perform a positioning task. Based on user surveys, we identify various nursing tasks where robotic assistance may be useful and provide design recommendations specifically in the area of healthcare.
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ISSN:0169-1864
1568-5535
DOI:10.1163/016918611X558243