A preliminary study of Patient Lifting Robot for Nurse assistance

Abstract

The advancement in technology and medicine has indeed tremendously improved the medical treatment, health and hospital care. In spite of that, the increasing rate of patients being admitted into hospitals and health care centres requires a new type of assistance. Patients need to be lifted in order to be transferred from bed to stretcher and vice versa. According to National Health Institute (USA), existing manual patient lifting techniques are proven failure due to various reasons such as lack of manpower, improper application of body mechanics, overloaded hospital wards, etc. This puts the nurses at risk for injuring their back due to excessive force load applied to the spine leading to backache and other health problems. To solve this problem, a Patient Lifting Robot (PALBOT) is introduced. PALBOT is a semiautomatic robot operated manually by a trained nursing staff to assist nurses by reducing the frequency required for forwardbending and lifting or turning patients to change bed sheets (which is never a safe task), and bending and lifting during lateral transfer of patient to another bed or stretcher. In this paper, a preliminary study of the design and development of patient lifting robot for nurse assistance is presented briefly covering from body mechanics, lifting methods, control system to the application of artificial intelligence.