Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated methods to facilitate contactless
evaluation of patients in hospital settings. By minimizing unnecessary
in-person contact with individuals who may have COVID-19 disease,
healthcare workers (HCW) can prevent disease transmission, and conserve
personal protective equipment. Obtaining vital signs is a ubiquitous
task that is commonly done in-person. To eliminate the need for
in-person contact for vital signs measurement in the hospital setting,
we developed Dr. Spot, an agile quadruped robotic system that comprises
a set of contactless monitoring systems for measuring vital signs and a
tablet computer to enable face-to-face medical interviewing. Dr. Spot is
teleoperated by trained clinical staff to facilitate enhanced
telemedicine. Specifically, it has the potential to simultaneously
measure skin temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate, and blood oxygen
saturation simultaneously while maintaining social distancing from the
patients. This is important because fluctuations in vital sign
parameters are commonly used in algorithmic decisions to admit or
discharge individuals with COVID-19 disease. Here, we deployed Dr. Spot
in a hospital setting with the ability to measure the vital signs from
healthy volunteers from which the measurements of elevated skin
temperature screening, respiratory rate, heart rate, and SpO2 were
carefully verified with ground-truth sensors.