Development of Robotic Arm Based Diagnostic System for Clinical Tele-Monitoring

Abstract

Over the years there has been a lot of advancement in the quest to improve the process of diagnosing deadly clinical diseases such as Ebola and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), etc. One of such improvements is the development of diagnostic systems such as the Da Vince machine. However, the cost of acquisition of such systems is very high and requires interaction between the medical attendants and patients at some points. Hence, the need for a tele-diagnostic system that will reduce the attendant to patient interaction for these deadly and tropical diseases. This work, presents a robotic arm based tele-diagnostic system for remote monitoring of patient with endemic deadly disease like Ebola and MERS. The robotic arm in the developed system has three Degree of Freedom (DOF) with a temperature sensor as the end effector of the arm which allows interaction between the robot arm and the patients in the clinical environment. The arm was completed using servo motors to achieve each DOF and a network of encoders was developed to control the arm within its workspace based on the mapped signals provided to the servo motors by the ATMEGA368 Microcontroller unit which was programmed using Arduino Integrated Development Environment. To process and visualize the patient’s body temperature values from the sensor, a clinical software was built in the processing version 2.2.1 environment which communicates serially through an RS232 cable with the microcontroller unit. A Graphic User Interface (GUI) was also developed to show the variation in the patient’s body temperature graphically. Several testing and validation were carried out and the results obtained showed that operating the robotic arm without any program delay introduced will result to an unstable display of temperature data on the GUI.