In general, the applications of robots have shifted rapidly from industrial uses to social uses. This provides robots with the ability to naturally interact with human beings and socially fit into the human environment. The deployment of social robots in the healthcare system is becoming extensive as a result of the shortage of healthcare professionals, rising costs of healthcare and the exponential growth in the number of vulnerable populations such as the sick, the aged and children with developmental disabilities. Consequently, social robots are used in healthcare for providing health education and entertainment for patients in the hospital and for providing aids for the sick and aged. They are also used for dispensing drugs and providing rehabilitation as well as emotional and aging care. Hence, social robots improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare services. The interaction between social robots and human beings is known as human-robot interaction. Human-robot interaction in healthcare is faced with numerous challenges such as the fear of displacement of caregivers by robots, safety, usefulness, acceptability as well as appropriateness. These challenges ultimately lead to a low rate of acceptance of the robotic technology. Consequently, this paper extensively appraises human-robot interaction in healthcare, their applications and challenges. Design, ethical and usability issues such as privacy, trust, safety, users’ attitude, culture, robot morphology as well as emotions and deception arising from the interaction between humans and robots in healthcare are also reviewed in this paper.

There is a rapid increase in the demand of healthcare resources in Nigeria mainly healthcare personnel and healthcare facilities. This is due to the prevalence of chronic diseases such as endemic malaria, arthritis, hypertension, diabetes; an upsurge in the rate of avoidable deaths as well as an exponential increase in the population. However, healthcare resources in Nigeria are insufficient. For instance, in recent times, the ratio of doctors to the inhabitants is 1: 4,857. Moreover, more than 60% of the Nigerian populace resides in rural areas where there are extreme shortages of healthcare practitioners and healthcare facilities due to geographical isolation and lack of opportunities. Hence, the low ratio of healthcare practitioners to patients causes a heavy workload on the healthcare practitioners. This however leads to medical errors as healthcare providers work under intense pressure to attend to the medical needs of their patients. This in turns leads to considerable loss of lives. In order to ameliorate this situation, this paper proposes an ontology based framework that will enable healthcare providers in Nigeria to continuously monitor their patients’ health remotely outside the settings of the hospital. This will reduce the workload of the healthcare providers, assist them in decision making process as well as reduce the long waiting hours of the patients within the hospital environment. This framework is also designed to tackle the challenge of semantic interoperability facing healthcare systems around the globe.

Interoperability of health related information is one of the agendas of many counties in the world, with no exception to Nigeria and other developing countries. This is because healthcare costs are rising exponentially. However, interoperability of health related information seem largely unattainable in Nigeria due to reluctance to change from the traditional paper based healthcare system to the use of e-health systems, inadequate ICT infrastructure, poor utilization of the available ICT resources, erratic power supply, increased burden of underdevelopment, poverty, political instability, shortage of educational capacity in Nigeria rural and urban healthcare centers, low level of ICT awareness, poor maintenance culture as well as corruption. Consequently, the healthcare system in Nigeria is saddled with high cost, high rate of disease outbreak driven by HIV/AIDs, malaria and other infectious diseases which results in a high rate of mortality. Nevertheless, the urgent need to meaningfully exchange safe and reliable health information is a key priority to the healthcare system in Nigeria as the qualities of patients’ care depend majorly on the timely acquisition, processing and retrieval of data related to the patient. Thus, this paper attempts to unravel the factors hindering interoperability in the Nigeria healthcare system and suggests ways of making total interoperability a reality in Nigeria healthcare system as well as other developing countries.