Development and real time control of an arm for patient assistance for lifting mobility robot (Palmbot)

• Main Author: Muralindran Mariappan
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English; English
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: TJ210.2-211.47 Mechanical devices and figures. Automata. Ingenious mechanisms. Robots (General)
• Online Access: https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/38710/1/24%20PAGES.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/38710/2/FULLTEXT.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/38710/
• Institution: Universiti Malaysia Sabah

The dawn of medical robots for hospital applications has enormously enhanced the services rendered to the patients. The medical robots, spanning from surgical to rehabilitation, provide their support not only to the doctors but to the patients as well. In spite of such advancement, some major health hazards still exist for the hospital nurses. Lifting and moving the patients in hospitals are the usual duties of nurses. Injuries and backache occur while they frequently lift the unconscious, uncooperating or immobile patients. This research highlights on the development of a single prototype arm of a Patient Assistance for Lifting Mobility Robot (PALMBOT) as an effort in order to resolve this problem. Fieldwork conducted in Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Nursing Training College, Kata Kinabalu reveals that 83. 9% of nurses have backache and back injuries due to patient handling. Observations on lifting techniques and hospital specifications were used to conceive the PALMBOT. The PALMBOT is a semi-automatic robot designed especially to assist nurses to perform lifting and transferring patients to different locations, thereby reducing the chances of nurses getting injured during these tasks. The three arms of the PALMBOT, which perform the automatic patient loading and unloading process, use a set of open end conveyor systems. Since safety is a primary concern of the PALMBOT, Artificial Intelligence (Al) was incorporated in developing various sensing and control modules. Neural network was employed for the detection and execution systems which consist of Patient Position Tracking System (PPTS), Danger Monitoring System (DMS), Automatic Procedure Sequencing System (APSS) and Fail Safe and Automatic Recovery System (FSARS). The intricacy faced in maintaining the tension of the conveyor was resolved by using fuzzy logic in the Conveyor Tension Control System. A prototype single PALMBOT arm was fabricated. All the hardware and software modules are interconnected by using several tools such as MATLAB, EPOS Position Control and MPLAB® IDE PIC C working on the LABVIEW V8.0 as a common platform. The PALMBOT system is tested by a set of experiments and by simulated studies and found to be demonstrating an acceptable performance. It is envisaged that the PALMBOT is a very useful addition to the modern hospital facilities.