Application advantages and development status of emerging nursing robots

1. The significance and future space of nursing robots

"A Robot in Every Home." As Bill Gates has said, robots will become as much a part of our daily lives as the personal computer industry. Throughout the world, the rapid arrival of industrialization, urbanization, aging population and great changes in family structure have made many countries more and more pressure on old-age care and disease care. The traditional nursing model no longer meets the social needs of population increase and slow aging, advanced lifestyle and nursing model are slowly improving human life, and nursing robot is highly respected because of its intelligent and multi-functional future development trend.

1.1 The aging of society is worsening

At present, there are about 1.041 billion elderly people in the world, and population aging has become a major social problem in the world. At the current rate, by 2100 there will be three times as many people as there are now, and there will be three billion more. The degree of aging in developed countries will be more prominent, and the elderly over 60 years old in developed countries in Europe and the United States now account for about 23.3%, and will reach 33.4% by 2050. The number of elderly people in developing countries is expected to double by 2050. The rapid growth of aging in developed countries has caused many problems for economic and social development [1]. Most of these elderly people have decreased physical function and vitality, and they face many difficulties and obstacles, such as no care for daily life, no timely treatment of diseases, and no relief from negative emotions. More and more elderly people need timely nursing services to ensure safety and social stability, which is a serious challenge to the cause of old-age care and nursing.

1.2 Impaired health of the elderly

Taking China as an example, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Health, about half of the elderly over the age of 60 in China suffer from hypertension, and about 80% of the elderly suffer from at least one or more chronic diseases. The proportion of self-reported chronic diseases among the elderly in urban communities accounted for 79.91%; The self-evaluation of health status was good only 20.25%, and poor 42.30%[2]. The disabled people, mainly the elderly, face a variety of difficulties in life and work, and most of them have decreased physical function and are plagued by diseases.

1.3 Insufficient social care force

Faced with such a large number of disabled people, the nursing industry in our country is facing great pressure. According to the third Straits Nursing Forum data show that in December 2011, the total number of registered nurses in China was 2.244 million. Since the elderly population reached 143.244 million as early as 2006, it is clear that caregivers cannot complete all the care work. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, as of April 2013, China's urban and rural elderly care institutions have about 3.65 million beds, far from enough for the elderly. China's nursing service industry is facing severe challenges, directly stimulating the domestic nursing robot market. The society is in urgent need of intelligent equipment in nursing, which is applied to families and nursing homes, and the more professional nurses can not care for the body and mind of the elderly, so that they can happily integrate into modern life.

1.4 Rapid development of the robot industry

Robot is a kind of interdisciplinary high-tech products, which involves kinematics, dynamics, control engineering, materials science, artificial intelligence and other disciplines. The growth process of robot is the creation, improvement and comprehensive configuration process of computers, sensors and various institutional systems.

Today, robots have developed from the first generation of teaching and reproducing robots, the second generation of robots with feelings to the third generation of intelligent robots. At present, foreign scientists have made great progress in mobile mechanism design, sensor fusion and environmental modeling technology, path planning technology, energy technology, intelligent control technology, human-computer interaction technology, cost control and other aspects [3].

2. Development advantages of nursing robots

2.1 Improve the quality of life of the elderly

There are many diseases in the elderly, and the robot can act as a disease recorder and medical file record library, which can allow doctors to have a more complete understanding of the condition, so that they can make more accurate guidance. Because the monitoring robot does not need to rest, and can be continuously monitored for a long time in the process of work, and through its own sensors and other monitoring equipment to observe the monitoring object, and collect the corresponding physiological characteristics information, and finally store it, which is convenient for follow-up targeted treatment and analysis of the elderly. This is conducive to the elimination of diseases in the elderly.

The nursing robot also has a remote transmission function, which can upload the information it collects in real time. The doctor only needs to receive the medical information uploaded by the robot device to treat the patient without leaving the house, and the patient can also communicate with the doctor directly through the robot communication network. This not only saves the time on the way to the hospital, but also ensures the best period of disease treatment to a large extent, which plays an important role in ensuring the health of the elderly. Especially for those elderly people with mobility difficulties, the role and advantages of home care robots are particularly obvious. At the same time, this real-time telemedicine achieved by home care robots not only achieves the purpose of improving the efficiency of medical care by traditional telemedicine, but also can overcome the problem of low accuracy of traditional medical care.