A review on human robot collaboration and its application in the health care sector

Abstract

Europe is usually named as “The Old Continent”, and looking at the demographics, the nickname is starting to become a reality. The population in Europe is getting older. In 1950, only 12% of the population was over 65 years old. Nowadays, the proportion has doubled, and projections show that in 2050 more than 36% of Europe´s population will be over 65 years old. In the next ten years around 30% of the population in Germany will be over 65 years old, and eight percent will even be over 80. In Spain the same trend will follow, the population over 65 years old, which is currently the 19,2% of the total population, will reach 25,2% of the total population by 2033. It is therefore predictable that the number of people in need of care will increase rapidly. Today, what still seems like dreams of the future and provokes fierce ethical debates will probably become an integral part of our social reality: the use of robots in health care. One circumstance that makes this development even more probable and which is hardly mentioned in the current debate is that the health care industry is particularly affected by the consequences of demographic change in two ways. While the number of people in need of long-term care is rising, fewer people are choosing to enter the nursing profession; at the same time, older nursing professionals are leaving hospitals and nursing homes early due to the high physical and psychological strain. Healthcare robots are intended to support and relieve the workload of nursing staff. They bring medicine, food and beverages to the sick and elderly patients, help them to lie down and stand up or alert the emergency services. Although health care robots are currently in most cases prototypes, they are an important issue in politics, society and science. The development of health care robotics benefits significantly from the knowledge and experience of industrial robotics, in particular, human-robot collaboration (HRC) systems can be transferred. Industrial robots have been used in production worldwide for four decades. Their significance for our current production systems is immense and the industrial sector would not exist as it is without them. However, the general idea of these systems is characterized by powerful mechanical constructions that perform tasks with high speed, enormous power and special accuracy that a human worker either do not want to perform for ergonomic reasons or simply cannot perform with such precision. Such systems, which usually do their work behind fences and without any human intervention, are not suitable for healthcare applications. A new category of robots, the so-called cobots (short for collaboration robots), has been developed recently. Cobots are designed to work together with humans. Of course, such an HRC only works if cobots may act in a common working environment instead of being locked up behind fences. Complex tasks that can neither be economically nor technologically fully automated could be broken down into subtasks that are partly 2 performed by humans and partly by robots. For example, a cobot in an industrial application can hand a component to the worker for assembly, or the cobot can powerfully and precisely insert a component selected and tested by the worker to be assembled. Since these systems are designed for safe cooperation with people, they are also conceivable for applications in the health care sector. This master thesis aims to show that it´s possible to take advantage of all the advances, and development of HRC in the health care sector. Although most of this advances and development have taken place in the industry sector the aim is to show that there is a way and many reasons to use them also in the health sector. It´s about finding out why the HRC hasn´t been implanted yet in the health sector, which are the problems that arise, whether they are technical, security or ethical issues. The characteristics of cobots will be described, a review will be done about different issues considered of interest for the present paper such as human factors, situation awareness, safety and robot acceptance. Then, HRC will be looked at from the perspective of the healthcare sector. First there will be a review of the state of the art of robots in this sector, the term “Healthcare 4.0” will be introduced establishing a connection with “Industry 4.0”. The following is a brief description of the current situation of the health system due to the coronavirus crisis and focuses on this crisis as an opportunity to introduce the HRC in the health sector showing that it could be of great help. Two possible applications of HRC will be described to illustrate this. Finally, attention will be paid to the restrictions that arise when it comes to implanting robots in the health sector, because, if they could be so helpful, why are they not yet implanted? Security reasons will be mentioned, but particular attention will be paid to the ethical dilemmas that arise when introducing robots in the health sector. A webbased survey will try to clarify this kind of ethical dilemmas. The survey consists of questions on many of the topics discussed throughout this work. And by analysing the answers, conclusions will be drawn to help in dealing with the ethical dilemmas that arise when introducing collaborative robots into the health sector. Altogether, this Master Thesis explored the Human Robot Collaboration in the healthcare sector, its restrictions, its opportunities in different applications and its acceptance by society.