Robots are getting their time to shine through the current coronavirus pandemic. They’re getting jobs like delivering Amazon.com packages, sorting parcels for FedEx, and even measuring patients’ vital signs at healthcare facilities.
The last job may be the most helpful because assessing people who have COVID-19 symptoms is one of the riskiest parts of a health care worker’s position at the moment. The robot that landed that trial job is called Spot – the same robot that was leased by the police last year.
Spot was made by the Boston Dynamics – an MIT spin-off engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992. (The same company made Cheetah – the world’s fastest four-legged robot that can also do backflips.) The trial location is Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
If you don’t know Spot already, it’s a four-legged dog-like machine that’s controlled by a handheld device. It has an arm too that can carry things and open doors. In this specific situation, the researchers have Dr. Spot taking a tablet to allows doctors to talk to the patients about their symptoms without being in the same room.
Henwei Huang, an MIT postdoc, said:
In robotics, one of our goals is to use automation and robotic technology to remove people from dangerous jobs. We thought it should be possible for us to use a robot to remove the health care worker from the risk of directly exposing themselves to the patient.
To give Spot the ability to measure vital signs, the MIT and BWH researchers used existing computer vision technologies and adapted them to make them mobile. This involved mounting four cameras onto the robot – three monochrome cameras that filter different light wavelengths and an infrared camera – enabling it to measure breathing rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen saturation, and pulse rate.
Huang said:
We didn’t really develop new technology to do the measurements. What we did is integrate them together very specifically for the COVID-19 application, to analyze different vital signs at the same time.
Spot could measure the vital signs from a distance of 2 meters (approximately 6.5 feet). The team tested its skills with healthy patients first. Next, the researchers will try it with patients showing symptoms of COVID-19.
Senior author of the study Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an MIT assistant professor of mechanical engineering, said:
We are thrilled to have forged this industry-academia partnership in which scientists with engineering and robotics expertise worked with clinical teams at the hospital to bring sophisticated technologies to the bedside.
The results of the testing will help them improve upon the system further. Eventually, they envision the robots being deployed in patients’ hospital rooms to continuously monitor their health and allow doctors to check on them without having to visit the space. However, the US Food and Drug Administration will have to approve the application first.
Boston Dynamics made Spot’s SDK available on GitHub so that programmers can develop new custom applications for the robot. The company is also selling Spot to anyone who wishes to buy one for US$74,500.
