Agile mobile robotic platform for contactless vital signs monitoring

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.