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They disinfect hospital corridors with ultraviolet light to remove traces of the new coronavirus. They help nurses manage routine tasks so they can spend more time with sick patients. They provide meals to people who follow public health orders to stay home and help police send warnings to those who are not.
As medical researchers rush to develop treatments and vaccines to deploy against the coronavirus, scientists and engineers are working on another type of weapon that could play an instrumental role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic: robots.
“As epidemics increase, the potential roles of robotics are becoming clearer,” wrote an international group of researchers last month in the journal Science Robotics.
The researchers said there is much more that robots could do if engineers concentrated their efforts on the greatest needs.
“Right now, we really need to make sure we have a global sustainable approach orchestrated to [robotics] research, “said Guang-Zhong Yang, dean of the Jiao Tong University Institute of Medical Robotics in Shanghai.
Here is a closer look at how robots could play a bigger role in the pandemic.
Robots on the front line
A major concern in any infectious disease outbreak is minimizing the risk to doctors, nurses, and other health workers who are in direct contact with sick patients. If those caregivers also get sick, it means less treatment for patients.
“When health workers are at risk, we are all at risk,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization.
Robots could take their place under certain circumstances, such as administering tests to see if people have been infected with the coronavirus, Yang said. That is crucial because people who appear to be perfectly healthy may actually be infected and pass the disease on to others.
“Silent infection is the biggest problem,” said Yang.
A robot cares for a COVID-19 patient in the intensive care unit of an Italian hospital.
(Luca Bruno / Associated Press)
It helps robots not get sick, and unless they run out of power, they don’t need sleep.
Russell Taylor, a Johns Hopkins University robotist whose work led to the development of Da Vinci surgical robots, said medical robots could be useful in intensive care units where the risk of contamination was a major concern.
For example, a healthcare worker who needs to care for an Ebola patient may need to put on heavy personal protective equipment before entering a high-risk area, then removing and disposing of that equipment during the decontamination process at the end of their shift. That is time consuming, exhausting, and potentially dangerous.
Instead, sending a remotely operated robot to interact with the patient could dramatically reduce that risk, Taylor said. After all, robots are immune to biological pathogens and can be efficiently disinfected with harsh chemicals. Not so for human beings.
Robots behind the scenes
But doctors and healthcare workers don’t necessarily want to stop having contact with their patients, even with the risks involved, said Bill Smart, a roboticist at Oregon State University.
“The human contact part [of the job] it’s really important, “he said.
Robotics is still a developing field, and patient care is complex. If robots remain in supporting roles rather than protagonists, Smart explained, “you are not directly interacting with patients, where it could really go wrong if the robot breaks, and you are not denying the patient’s human contact, either.”
That said, robots could still help minimize the risk for these front-line medical employees by taking on more menial tasks to reduce the time a nurse or doctor has to spend in a dangerous environment.
That could mean using drones to transport medications to and within hospitals, or using robots to deliver meals. 24-hour disinfection with roaming robots, somewhat similar to a Roomba on steroids, could also minimize the risk of contamination.
A robot uses pulses of ultraviolet light to disinfect a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa.
(Michele Spatari / AFP via Getty Images)
Robots in the past
During the Ebola outbreak that started in 2014, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation organized workshops to identify ways that robots could make a difference.
But once the epidemic came under control, interest (and funding for) the project ran out.
“As a species, we tend to be a little ADD,” said Robin Murphy, a roboticist at Texas A&M University.
This approach to funding the party or the famine means that scientists, engineers and emergency medical personnel probably won’t have robotic tools ready by the time the next pandemic strikes, the scientists said.
It is similar to the problem faced by scientists working on vaccines and treatments for emerging infectious diseases. If research on the coronaviruses responsible for outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) had not been exhausted, options to combat COVID-19 would have been more readily available, scientists say. .
Robots in the future
Robotics has come a long way since that Ebola outbreak. Computer vision has improved, detection capabilities have improved, and artificial intelligence has become smarter. All this translates into greater potential to use robots well.
Today, investing in robotics development is a lot like investing in a large snowplow, Murphy said. It is expensive and is not used for much of the year. But when a big snowstorm hits, it shows its worth.
A patrol robot checks temperatures and disinfects people at a hospital in Shenyang, China.
(STR / AFP via Getty Images)
Perhaps one solution is to place more robots in everyday hospital settings and make sure they can be reconfigured for a variety of possible disaster scenarios. That way they can earn a living and gain experience under the belts, until the next emergency arrives.
In this scenario, engineers would not design a robot specifically for the COVID-19 pandemic, Taylor said. The trick is to “find solutions that can be widely marketed for the next system in ways that are affordable.”
Robots in the team
Smart partnered with Doctors Without Borders after the Ebola outbreak began presenting opportunities for robots to help medical staff treat patients more effectively and save more lives.
Part of the problem with designing effective emergency medical robots, he said, is that the best time to test them is during an actual outbreak. But that’s also the worst time, especially for doctors who rely on family procedures to deal with high-risk and stressful situations.
“It is really difficult to insert new things into those workflows because if you make a mistake more people will die,” said Smart.
So it is important to ensure that medical personnel are included in the development process from the beginning. “You can’t design a robot and take it to a hospital and say, ‘Here, use my robot,'” he said.
Making robots a more ubiquitous part of healthcare would not only help them become more financially viable, but would make them more familiar to healthcare workers who will need them in a pandemic.
“You want to integrate it into a person’s life before it becomes a stressful situation,” said Smart.
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