Kick-Off
On the 28th of September the HospiBot team held the Kick-Off meeting for the project and started with an interesting discussion about interactive robots and how they may help hospitals, their staff and patients. The team is excited for the next three years to come.
Payload Meeting
On the 12th of January the entire HospiBot-team held their first meeting in the new year. Goal of the meeting was to determine an order of importance for work put into various use cases.
Prof Dr Robert Wendlandt started the meeting with a short recall of the goals set at the beginning of the project and the team from the Odense Universitetshospital were the first to present their identified use cases. Emil Sikker, from the Sjaelland Universitetshospital, presented his suggestions for use cases and their prioritization. Next, Oskar Palinko, leader of the project, informed the rest of the team on the progress of the robot prototype and answered other occurring questions. Afterwards, Prof Dr Franziska Uhing, representative of the University of Applied Science Kiel, presented her proposal for use cases, after which a subsequent discussion evolved around various other aspects and priorities for the partners involved in the project. In the end, many of the prior presented suggestions were condensed into three major use cases which posed the highest priority for the individual partners.
The meeting was an important step stone in further developing the future of the project and allowed room for an interesting discussions about all the possibilities the project holds. Now the individual teams are working with joy on the preparation for the next in-person meeting in March.
Giobotics Company Visit
On the 14th of Feburary members of the HospiBot project visited Giobotics, a company specialized in distributing service robots for gastronomy, health care, retail and industry purposes. Giobotics partners with Shenzhen based company Pudu Robotics and a company wide tour offered a wide range of interesting insights into the distribution, maintenance and further development of the robots.
The first hand experience from the day to day work with the robots and data about customer reactions were only a few of the valuable bits of knowledge Giobotics shared. Over the course of a talk with founder and owner of the company Jörg Fischer, a shared interest in cooperating further was developed, a decision both parties will profit from in the future.
Policy Meeting
On the 20th of Feburary the team held a meeting regarding the policy development. Lina Behrends from Fraunhofer IMTE presented feedback from a questionnaire on prior experience with robots hospitals in both Denmark and Germany took. From this feedback, important regulations and limitations for the usage of the robots could be identified and will be further examined to further the use case development and identification of relevant regulations.
Partner Meeting No. 2
On the 19th of March, the HospiBot-team came to Aabenraa for their second partner meeting. The meeting was kicked off by a few welcoming words by the hosts Sabine Olsen and Trine Fredskild of the Hospital Sønderjylland. After a few words on organisational aspects, Prof Dr Oskar Palinko and his students gave everyone a run down on the status of the development of the mobile base.
Prof Dr Robert Wendlandt of the University of Lübeck continued the meetings with insights into the current payload development and was followed by Prof Dr Franziska Uhing and Miriam Pfau who shared their findings on how the interaction flow between nurses and patients could be improved and what influences the trust development in human-robot-interaction. Afterwards, Lina Behrends from the Fraunhofer IMTE talked further about the policy development. The meeting was closed with a small workshop on the testing plans for the robot by the hosts, Sabine Olsen and Trine Fredskild.
The HospiBot-team was excited to meet again in person after the first Kick Off Meeting last year and the open discussion on each topic brought up interesting angles or other aspects to consider to improve the development further. The team is already excited for the next meeting.
New Network Partner
Giobotics from Kiel joined the Interreg project Hospibot as a network partner in April 2024. The company, which has several years of expertise in the implementation of cleaning and service robots in large quantities, provides the developers of the Hospibot prototypes with valuable feedback and advice in workshops on typical challenges in practice and noteworthy details, for example in the area of user interaction or navigation.