hospOS: A Platform for Service Robot Orchestration in Hospitals - Saving Time of Nurses With Robot Management

The ageing population, the shortage of nurses and manual work processes are limiting healthcare provision, particularly in rural areas. At the same time, service robots are emerging. While service robots could save hospital staff time and increase efficiency, their use in patient care is still limited. Obstacles include the robots’ task-specific inflexibility and the lack of interoperability and integration into the building infrastructure. Individual robots are also occasionally used, which fulfill all functional requirements but are very complex and expensive as a result. In contrast, we propose to use and combine existing service robots for different tasks. We argue that for a better integration of service robots in healthcare, a dedicated service robot management system has become a necessity. We propose hospOS, a centralized system for orchestrating service robots in healthcare facilities. hospOS fills this gap by providing a modular, flexible and user-friendly platform that seamlessly integrates service robots into the hospital IT infrastructure, alleviating the shortage of caregivers and thus improving patient care. The platform was developed with a focus on interoperability, modularity and compliance with regulations and industry standards. We installed hospOS in two rural hospitals and evaluated three use cases: Telemedicine, Transportation and Orientation Services. This paper provides an overview of the architecture and discusses the functionalities and potential benefits of hospOS, along with its implementation in healthcare scenarios. To quantify the benefits, we provide initial results in time savings in two of the three use cases, derived from data from the two rural hospitals. The results of the deployments show time savings in transportation and orientation as well as large further potential through wider use.