[Robots may be a valuable resource in treating Coronavirus (and other) patients, protecting human caregivers while offering remote care and evoking medium-as-social-actor presence. The short story below is from BBC Newsround (where it features three different images); the Global Times adds this detail:
“Medical assistant robots can even help patients with dancing or exercising. A medical assistant robot named Ginger was seen leading patients to dance in the hospital in a video sent to the Global Times by the robot’s developer, CloudMinds, a cloud intelligent robot operator headquartered in Beijing. Ginger can also offer information consultation and other services, which can ease patients’ psychological pressure and boost their confidence.”
For more coverage see Interesting Engineering, the New York Post and a 2:39 minute CNBC news report, as well as a press release from CloudMinds via Business Wire. The Star also has a story about Foodom, a robot chef preparing “120 servings of clay pot rice with different ingredients… for the army of doctors, nurses and health officials staffing the quarantine centre” in Wuhan as well as other efforts to deploy technology in the face of the outbreak.
–Matthew]
[Image: Source: YaTwitt on Twitter via Interesting Engineering]
Robots helping patients to recover in Wuhan hospital
March 12, 2020
Robots are being used to help treat patients in a hospital in China.
Two hundred people there, who have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, are now being treated by them on a ward in the city of Wuhan.
Six types of robots have been brought in to help carry out basic tasks for the patients who are staying in a closed-off ward, such as delivering food and medicine, and keeping the ward clean.
They’ve been created by a Chinese company called CloudMinds.
Its CEO, Bill Huang, said: “This is China’s first-ever entirely robot-led ward and an opportunity to test the capability of the technology and how we work together.”
Some of the robots look like humans – for example CloudPepper pictured above – but others look more like boxes on wheels.
It is hoped that this will help stop the virus spreading and will protect hospital staff from catching it, while patients are still looked after.
The robots have a map of the ward stored in a cloud-based server, and they’re controlled by humans using a 5G connection.
Patients in the ward are also wearing bracelets that monitor their heart rate and their temperatures. These are recorded and shown on a screen outside the ward for hospital staff to view.
Most of the patients are on the ward because they are not in need of serious medical help, but if a patient is starting to feel worse then they will be transferred to a human-run ward.
In the future, it might be that more robots will be used to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.
Already throughout the city of Wuhan, robots have been used to deliver food and disinfect outside areas.
Recently, scientists at Tsinghua University in Beijing have developed a robotic arm that can be controlled by doctors in a separate room.
The arm can swab patients’ mouths, perform ultrasounds and even listen to their organs!
Mr Huang said the robots seem to have a positive effect on the patients: “I talked to staff in the hospitals. They say the patients are very bored being isolated, so they love to see the robots.”
But professor of robotics, Chenguang Yang [at UWE Bristol], said that while the robots could be very helpful, people working with the robots need to be careful as they are still being developed: “Robots that share space with humans, also known as cobots, need to reach very high safety standards, otherwise it’s simply too dangerous.”