Design and implementation assistant robot used in nuclear medicine: The first-step achievements

Abstract

Nuclear medicine is a medical specialty that is increasingly gaining prominence. Although the radiation emitted by radiotracers enables visualisation of the functions of a patient’s organs, it also poses risks to nearby individuals, particularly medical staff. The application of robots to assist or replace humans in such hazardous tasks offers a potential solution. This article presents the initial achievements of a project aimed at designing and implementing a robot for assistance in nuclear medicine. The robot is designed to facilitate transportation, provide audio-visual connections for telemedicine, and offer an interface for remotely interpreting survey meter readouts. Its robust and flexible movement system employs a differential steering mechanism. The software is based on a client-server ar- chitecture featuring multi-threaded processing and network-socket-based data exchange. The client-server design enables control of the robot via an online, cost-free console webpage. The radiation measurement interface, which integrates an Internet of Things (IoT) camera module with an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, efficient- ly incorporates conventional devices into a network platform. This article highlights the extensive efforts made to enhance both hardware and software design efficiency, alongside the initial achievements of the project.