East Tallinn Central Hospital (Ida-Tallinna Keskhaigla) is the third biggest hospital in Estonia with 538 beds and over 2200 people working there.

There are at least two use cases for telepresence robots in hospitals: reducing the workload of the personnel and giving the patients a possibility to communicate with their friends and relatives.

At this time our experiment setup included 4 nurses “visiting” the patients via a telepresence robot from a room located in the same building. We collected responses from both the nurses and the patients and will publish the results soon.

Although in general the feedback was positive, we ourselves are not satisfied with the results for a purely technical reason. Wi-Fi connectivity in the hospital leaves much to be desired to say the least and as the robots are very sensitive to the quality of data transmission in such cases, we use our own 4G access point. However, East Tallinn Central Hospital is located in an old building with very thick walls, and we experienced occasional freezes and image quality loss. Although the nurses were very optimistic, we think that more sophisticated infrastructure is required for telepresence robots to be used in such environments.

Although this post was intended to give some insights on the article presentation, it is impossible to pass over the venue of the conference - University of Zaragoza, established in 1542, but still in all its glory.

The topic of the presentation delivered by Aleksei Talisainen was “ Higher Education Teachers’ perceptions about teaching and learning related qualities of telepresence robots”. The slides of the presentation are available here and below you will find a brief overview of the report.

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Our research group visited Tallinn Healthcare College to study their learning environment and readiness to experiment with telepresence robots in simulated hospital situations. We were admitted by solid team including rector of College Ülle Ernits, head of Chair of Nursing Kristi Puusepp et ali.

The training environment of the College appeared fully friendly for deployment of telepresence robots and we even succeeded to run few ad hoc experimental situations in group training process.

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Our research group activity drew attention of one of the most popular newspapers in Estonia and “Postimees” published an article named “Can’t attend the event yourself? No problem, telepresence robot can”. The article was discussed on the television the next day and we are very happy about that, however the host skipped the “read the article yourself” homework and remained wondering what the application of telepresence robots might be. We would be more than glad to explain that in many details should we be given an opportunity.

Aleksei, Janika and Kristel from our research group gave a workshop on telepresence robotics to 50 general education teachers in Tallinn University on the 1st November. Together we explored the functionality and limitations of the Double 3, Ohmni and Temi robots. Teachers were moderately optimistic of imaging their future in telepresence mode.

Temi, a newcomer to our fleet of Double 3 and Ohmni robots made its first (incredibly positive) appearance. More details on this guy below.

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In addition to the participation in the seminar we visited Dr. Ismail Khalil and Dr. Karin Anna Hummel from the Institute of Cooperation of Johannes Kepler University research interests lay within human-machine and machine-machine interaction, and also IoT sensors. We share the belief that telepresence robots could strongly benefit from the results of Ismail and Karin research.

Professor Zsolt Lavicza our research group met the next day shared his considerations on STEM education research methods that our EuroteQ course on social interactions using telepresence robots will greatly benefit from. We are looking forward to future cooperation.

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