Prototype of natural user interface applied to a robotic arm for medical attention preventing nosocomial infections in healthcare personnel

In this work, an experimental prototype of natural user interface based on Kinect for the tele-operation of a robotic arm, was developed as a technological support to contribute in facing the global crisis of health generated by COVID-19, a dangerous and highly transmissible virus. Until now, it is causing thousands of deaths and growing of contagion rates around the world, involving a serious situation for healthcare personnel that works in hospitals attending infected population. This system was proposed with the aim to control a robotic arm for medical purposes to achieve a quality medical care to COVID-19 patients without risk implications for healthcare workers associated to nosocomial infections due to direct contact with infected patients, contaminated medical equipment, surgical objects and surfaces. The developed prototype is able of being manipulated in real time requiring neither physical controller nor any contact device to carry out its functions, but simply motion or gesture from the user’s arm. It can be applied in areas such as teleoperation, tele-rehabilitation, telehealth nursing, assistive and therapeutic robotic devices, elderly care which are the last tendency in medicine at this time. Kinect V2, the Software Development kit SDK 2.0, Microsoft visual C# and Arduino were used for this purpose.