On December 13, 2022, Janika Leoste, Katrin Kangur, and Kristel Marmor visited the technology transfer center of Taltech to present a start grant on the topic of telepresence robots in hospital work.
The proposal highlighted the benefits of using a telepresence robot in comparison to communication through other screens, and presented the flexible solutions that using a telepresence robot in a hospital can offer to doctors and nurses. We explained how the robot could facilitate information exchange between patients, hospital staff, and the patient’s relatives or acquaintances. The start grant would provide us with the opportunity to test the robots in both hospitals and simulation labs.
Our cooperation partners in this project are East Tallinn Central Hospital (Ida-Tallinna keskhaigla) and Tallinn Health College (Tallinna Tervishoiu Kõrgkool), who have also provided specific ideas and requests for the use of telepresence robots

There has been a lot of hype about OpenAI chatbot that uses neural networks to give almost conscious answers and causing problems in schools because is writes outstanding essays and working computer code, so we decided to put its forecasting abilities to test. Although the AI was very cautions in its predictions, we generally agree to its opinion and Janika Leoste delivered a keynote on the same topic earlier this week.

Although somewhat longer, the keynote gives in-depth analysis of the current situation and suggests possible prospects for the use of telepresence robots both in general and in higher education in particular, and we sincerely recommend watching it.

The event in Kuressaare deserves special mention, because for the first time in our practice, the robot was used in a very large audience. Since the capabilities of the built-in microphone were obviously insufficient for such a hall, auxiliary measures had to be taken.

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In case you missed it, in one of our previous publications we discussed troubles with wireless network coverage in Tallinn University. Such issues lead to poor user experience and may have a dramatic effect on the perception of telepresence robots in general, therefore we decided to run a series of tests. More on that below.

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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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