EcoSocioBotics2022 - Laura Corti

Eco-socio-botics 2022: Social Robotics for sustainability

Workshop, 16th December 2022

organized by

Ilaria Alfieri, Antonio Fleres, Luisa Damiano

A satellite workshop of the International Conference of Social Robotics 2022 (ICSR2022), 13-16 December 2022

Talk Details:

Social robotics for a sustainable development: a use case on undernutrition in thehospital 4.0

Laura Corti, Francesco Scotto Di Luzio, Nevio Luigi Tagliamonte, Marta Bertolaso, Loredana Zollo
Campus Bio-medico University, Rome, Italy
Abstract: In recent decades, technological innovation has led to significant advances in various areas of our lives, such as healthcare. In 2020, the advent of the pandemic precipitously accelerated the slow digital and technological transformation which had been taking shape since the late 1990s. The virtuous use of new technologies during the current pandemic makes us expect an even more significant technology-based development. In literature [1, 2, 3], for example, we found an increasing reference to the theme of healthcare 4.0 and hospital 4.0, i.e., a further paradigm shift that is structured around the correlated and integrated use of different technologies. Healthcare 4.0 paradigm is configured as a multi-level transformation that implies a cultural, scientific, regulatory, and organizational change capable of putting the person and the well-being at the center. It is built upon Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), AI-based solutions, medical and social robotics, and bio-medical devices, and asks for a new approach to sustainable development. This new model of healthcare is focused on the shift from a paradigm based on technology development to a rethinking of technology for human beings, emphasizing the active and participatory role of the person in both design and assessment phases. For this reason, it is urgent to consider the theoretical, applicative, social, and ethical aspects of this new form of paradigm in the post-pandemic scenario, especially focusing on robotic solutions with an increasing level of autonomy. What is the role of healthcare 4.0 in the healthcare challenges of the coming years, such as the management of chronic diseases or management of degenerative diseases? Does the 4.0 paradigm bring a more sustainable paradigm to healthcare? How to read and treat the data coming from the advanced devices and robots interacting with patients and monitoring them? Can the concept of health and disease be reshaped according to the new and changing healthcare model? How does physical-digital health and robotics-based interventions modify the relationship between the patient and the clinical staff? Numerous social functioning1 robotic systems are already adopted in the clinical scenario, for different applications ranging from the treatment of neurological disorders to musculoskeletal pathologies, and new trends push researchers to investigate solutions with greater level of autonomy [4]. We want to solicit a discussion starting from a case study for the hospital 4.0 on the use of a service mobile robot for monitoring and supporting the treatment of geriatric patients at risk of undernutrition. Such condition recognizes several causes but one of the most common is dysphagia that affects more than 50% of elderly hospitalized patients and can have various causes, including neurological, muscular and oncological disorders. Since state-of-the-art robots are currently not suitable for the use in a hospital setting on patients suffering from dysphagia because they cannot monitor difficulties in swallowing, identify coughs, understand the type and quantity of assumed food and estimate ingested calories and macronutrients, we are developing a new robotic platform to implement these functionalities, as part of the European project ODIN. The smart platform, based on the TIAGo robot (PAL Robotics, Spain), will be tested at Fondazione Policlinico Campus Bio-Medico di Roma and will have the capabilities to: i) monitor the required energy intake to avoid weight and muscle mass loss, thusminimizing malnutrition risks for the patient, ii) verify that the patient is following correctly the prescribed diet and iii) identify any events of cough or oxygen desaturation. The adoption of this platform, shown conceptually in Figure 1, will require a partial revision of the clinical workflow and aims at promoting thethird of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. On the one hand, it can be argued that the use of social monitoring robots is intended to improve the quality of care; on the other hand, it is necessary to adopt a human-centric approach [5] to make such robots effectively integrated in the proposed scenario, i.e. the hospital. In terms of patients' perspective,specifically addressing the elderly point of view, it will be necessary to investigate the acceptability and sustainability of the robotic solution, that will navigate autonomously in the environment, reach the patients (by avoiding any static and dynamic obstacles along the way) and, at the same time, have a reassuring behavior with them. Evidently, these objectives pose not only numerous technological and scientific challenges but also require addressing significant ethical issues. The results of our study may reveal whether and at what extent the use of a social functioning robot with autonomous navigation, cognitive and decision-making capabilities (monitoring the volume of food intake, the percentage of macronutrients and any coughing or signs of desaturation) can represent a valid and acceptable tool to help the identification of potential malnutrition, not only to optimize the hospital clinical workflow, by relieving the staff from monitoring activities, but also to improve the quality of care, in terms of patients’ well-being and experience.

References

[1] Tortorella, Guilherme Luz, et al. "Healthcare 4.0: trends, challenges and research directions." Production Planning & Control 31.15 (2020): 1245-1260.
[2] Afferni, Pierangelo, et al. "Hospital 4.0 and its innovation in methodologies and technologies." 2018 IEEE 31st International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS). IEEE, 2018.
[3] Yang, Geng, et al. "Homecare robotic systems for healthcare 4.0: visions and enabling technologies." IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics 24.9 (2020): 2535-2549.
[4] Kyrarini, Maria, et al. "A survey of robots in healthcare." Technologies 9.1 (2021): 8. [5 ] Corti, L. et al. (2020-2021), Healthcare 4.0 and Human-Centric Approach, MEDIC 28(2)-29(1):16-24

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