EDGE AI ENABLED SMART MEDICAL DISPENSING AND PATIENT CARE ROBOT FOR HOSPITAL ROOMS

Abstract: Edge Artificial Intelligence (Edge AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are transforming modern healthcare by enabling real-time, intelligent decision-making directly at the device level while ensuring low latency, reliability, and data privacy. However, existing hospital medication dispensing and patient monitoring systems largely rely on manual operations or cloud-based processing, which can lead to human errors, delayed responses, network dependency, privacy concerns, and increased workload for healthcare staff, limiting their effectiveness in critical care environments.To overcome these challenges, this project proposes an Edge AI-based Smart Medical Dispensing and Patient Care Robot that autonomously operates within hospital rooms. The robot navigates using IR sensor-based line following, verifies patient identity through YOLOv11 for face detection and LBPH for face recognition, and maps the authenticated patient with a locally stored prescription database. It further enables offline voice interaction using the Vosk speech recognition model, allowing the robot to communicate with patients in multiple languages such as English, Tamil, and Malayalam, thereby improving accessibility and user experience across diverse patient groups.In addition, the system performs on- device monitoring of vital parameters such as body temperature and pulse rate. All processing is executed at the edge, and any detected abnormalities are immediately communicated to caregivers through automated alerts. The proposed system significantly reduces medication errors, minimizes dependency on cloud infrastructure, enhances patient safety and data privacy, lowers operational costs, and reduces caregiver workload, making it a scalable and efficient solution for intelligent hospital automation.