Reception Robot Case Study: 10.1% of 1,703 Interactions at a Bavarian Hospital

Pressure on a rural reception desk

Reception desks in German hospitals field a steady stream of questions that are simple to answer and relentless in volume. At this rural hospital in Bavaria, every visitor question landed on the same small group of staff. The authors tie the case to wider strain: staff shortages and rising healthcare demand in Germany were the reasons given for trying service robots at reception.

Most of what crossed that desk was orientation. Visitors wanted directions and pointers to the right place, and staff absorbed those requests between their other tasks. Demand was also uneven, with staff requests concentrated in the late morning and early afternoon.

• Orientation questions dominated for both the robot and the staff
• Staff requests were concentrated between 10:00 and 15:00
• Staffing shortages and rising demand framed the case across German healthcare

A one week observation at the reception desk

The robot was placed at the reception desk for one week in September 2023. Every interaction across that week was counted and recorded as handled either by the robot or by reception staff. The practical question was simple: which requests could a robot take without sending visitors back to the desk?

The robot worked beside the existing team rather than replacing it. That is why the split between robot and staff is the central measure of the study, and why the desk kept its people for everything the robot did not take.

• Place the robot at the reception desk for one week
• Log every interaction across the study week
• Record which party handled each interaction
• Sort requests by type, with orientation the most common
• Compare robot and staff workload at the end of the week

What the week measured

Across 1,703 interactions, the robot handled 10.1 percent and reception staff handled 89.9 percent. The robot did not take over the desk. It took a minority share, and the rest still went to people.

The authors put the working time saving at about 2.15 hours during the study week. Over a single week that is a modest figure. Whether it grows depends on how the mix of questions and the robot share hold up over longer periods.

Timing mattered nearly as much as volume. The robot was busiest from 13:00 to 19:00, later than the staff peak between 10:00 and 15:00, so its busiest hours only partly overlapped with the desk's heaviest load.

Most interactions were short, mainly under one minute. That suits a robot answering a question in a sentence or two. The authors describe the robot as useful for information provision and call for fuller studies with more advanced robots.

What this means for a reception robot project

The lesson here is about scope, not headline share. A reception robot earns its place on the questions it can answer quickly and correctly, which in this study meant orientation, and it leaves the rest to people. Planning starts with a count of what actually arrives at the desk, by hour and by question type, before any robot is chosen.

Service Robot Co. is a full service, OEM neutral commercial robot integrator for US businesses. We select the right robots across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network, so one partner handles the whole lifecycle. Customers take robots on a three year lease with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment, which lets a site test its scope before committing to a long program.

This case is an analysis of a documented deployment. It is not a Service Robot Co. project. The takeaway we would carry into any healthcare or office site is plain: measure the desk first, match the robot to the questions it can handle, and plan for the share that still needs a person.