The recent pandemic has caused primary healthcare services to change their traditional functioning in a short time frame. There is growing evidence, however, that while organisational changes to healthcare delivery have occurred to protect those that are more exposed (both among staff and patients), these may lead to indirect, potentially harmful consequences, particularly to vulnerable groups, as well as an unwanted lack of equity when considering the inclusion of such group of people. Two major critical factors have been related to the management of critical care accesses and the availability of healthcare operators.In case of pandemics or exposure-driven illness , unfortunately, health operators and medical doctors are the designated first victims, both due to their potential contagion risk, as well as to the ever increasing psychological burden and work-related stress. However, a series of effective interventions are possible in order to enhance the safety measure and protect the healthcare operators, mitigate their psychological distress, while caring for patients without decreasing their perceived quality of service and adopting all the possible inclusion policies. This project aims to develop and implement a comprehensive robotic solution to help physicians, patients and their relatives, and tackle the factors influencing the perceived reduction of the quality of service and care during emergency situations. The main purpose of the project is then to enhance and enforce the readiness of any healthcare system in order to cope with emergency situation, operator shortage (e.g. in case of present or future potential epidemics), as well as taking into account the most fragile portion of the population (elders, mentally or physically impaired people, etc..). In order to do so we aim to cope with the predisposing factors that could potentially endanger the healthcare system during an emergency situation or when the operators are overwhelmed by work.
While hospitals should be the paramount places of inclusion, the application proposed in this project would be one of the first of its kind in the field, as well as a valid aid for the management of sudden emergencies such as pandemics and hazardous situations. The central kernel of the proposed research will be the use of robots in the hospital. Until now the meaning of the words "hospital robot" has been so far only limited to highly sophisticated pieces of machinery that have been typically used in operating rooms for precision operations. In the case of this proposal, however, robots would be implemented both as interactive physical interfaces,remotely driven by a doctor, and as autonomous systems capable of helping patients and relatives, as well as reduce the workload for the operators while performing standard non-specific tasks such as completing the clinical records with information that could be asked to the patient. Many studies of the proponents have already shown the curiosity and interest with which people interact with robots, therefore this implementation would also lead to a positive side effect by increasing the morale of hospitalized patients. The real strength of this proposal, however, lies in: a) the effective decrease in pressure on the healthcare system, which would continue to take advantage of the skills of doctors who can still offer their work remotely even when their access to a critical zone is restricted or they are forced to stay at home (e.g. in case of infection or contagion); and b) the enforcement of inclusion policies for disabled or impaired people, independently from the situations at hand. The transmission of data, controls, and audio-video flows constitute another technical aspect to consider and which requires innovative solutions. Data transmission is the most critical operation for mobile sensor networks in terms of energy waste. Particularly in the pervasive healthcare sensors network, it is paramount to preserve the quality of service also employing energy-saving policies. In this project, we will also implement a novel data compression approach to obtain shorter transmissions due to data compression. This approach will be based on the evaluation of the absolute and relative entropy, as yet experienced in several works of the proponents. Another key point that shows the novelty of the project also consists of the care for the regulatory and ethical aspects relating to the patient and the health personnel. The use of robotic interfaces will also include the application of policies to protect the personal data of patients and doctors, as well as to protect their privacy. The system will be equipped with all the security protocols and software solutions necessary to create an encrypted and secure system, which will fully comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation as well as several other privacy-related national and international regulations. While the latter aspect has already been addressed in literature as well as in several works by the proponents, and specifically on the field of privacy-preserving video recording and privacy enforcing context recognition, it has never been applied before in a challenging scenario such as intensive care units and hospital facilities in general. As far as we know, no study so far has been able to simultaneously predict the arrival of new patients, predicts the use of intensive care posts, as well as the duration of their use, predicts the trend of availability of the health workforce, increase this availability through robotic interfaces, and therefore provide hospital units with complete management of the allocation in the wards and consequent hospitalizations. We propose therefore to make it possible to develop software infrastructures that seamlessly activate healthcare workflow execution, also providing services by monitoring and enhancing hospital units' dependability, all that taking into account the practical difficulties of the problem as well as the legal and ethical aspects. Finally, we should highlight the positive impact of the proposed application both on the perceived quality of the healthcare service, as well as the psychological impact. Finally, by adding to normal medical operations also psychological interventions or actions that improve the patient's and operator¿s psychological well-being, we will improve the patient's perceived care and effectiveness of the treatment. The expected outcomes will also determine an effective improvement of the care effectiveness, and therefore the healing probability and a shortened recovery time, with a twofold consequence impacting both the economical aspects of the emergency management and the middle/long term sustainability for the healthcare system.