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Background:Technology has the potential to prevent patient falls in healthcare settings and to reduce work-related injuries among healthcare providers. However, the usefulness and acceptability of each technology requires careful evaluation. Framed by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and using the Adaptive Robotic Nursing Assistant (ARNA) to assist with patient ambulation, the present study examined the perceived usefulness of robots in patients’ fall prevention with implications for preventing associated work-related injuries among healthcare providers. Methods:Employing an experimental design, subjects were undergraduate nursing students ( N = 38) and one external subject (not a nursing student) who played the role of the patient. Procedures included subjects ambulating a simulated patient in three ways: (a) following the practice of a nurse assisting a patient to walk with the patient wearing a gait belt; (b) an ARNA-assisted process with the gait belt attached to ARNA; (c) an ARNA-assisted process with a subject walking a patient wearing a harness that is attached to ARNA. Block randomization was used with the following experimental scenarios: Gait Belt (human with a gait belt), “ARNA + Gait Belt” (a robot with a gait belt), and “ARNA + Harness” (a robot with a harness). Descriptive statistics and a multiple regression model were used to analyze the data and compare the outcome described as the Perceived Usefulness (PU) of a robot for patient walking versus a human “nurse assistant” without a robot. The independent variables included the experimental conditions of “Gait Belt,” “ARNA + Gait Belt,” and “ARNA + Harness,” the subject’s age, race, and previous videogame playing experience. Findings:Results indicated that PU was significantly higher in the Gait Belt + ARNA and Harness + ARNA conditions than in the Gait Belt condition ( p-value <.01 for both variables). In examining potential influencing factors, the effects of race (White, African American, and Asian), age, and previous video-playing experience were not statistically significant ( p-value >.05). Discussion:Results demonstrated that using robot technology to assist in walking patients was perceived by subjects as more useful in preventing falls than the gait belt. Patient fall prevention also has implications for preventing associated work-related injuries among healthcare providers. Implications:Understanding the effects of a subject’s perceptions can guide further development of assistive robots in patient care. Robotic engineers and interdisciplinary teams can design robots to accommodate worker characteristics and individual differences to improve worker safety and reduce work injuries.
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Situating Robots in the Emergency Department
The emergency department (ED) is a safety-critical environ- ment in which mistakes can be deadly and providers are over- burdened. Well-designed and contextualized robots could be an asset in the ED by relieving providers of non-value added tasks and enabling them to spend more time on patient care. To support future work in this application domain, in this paper, we characterize ED staff workflow and patient experience, and identify key considerations for robots in the ED, including safety, physical and behavioral attributes, usability, and training. Then, we discuss the task representation and data needed to situate the robot in the ED, based on this do- main knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on robot design for the ED that explicitly takes task acu- ity into account. This is an exciting area of research and we hope our work inspires further exploration into this problem domain.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734482
- PAR ID:
- 10145648
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AAAI Spring Symposium on Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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