Filenews 2 September 2020
A hospital in Massachusetts has found a new job for Spot, the Boston Dynamics dog-like robot: to be a doctor.
The four-legged yellow-and-black robot proved capable of getting vital patient readings from a distance of more than 1.8 metres. As the Daily Mail points out, this could allow healthcare workers to keep a distance from patients who may be infected with the coronavirus or other disease.
So far, Spot has only been tested on healthy patients at Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School, and the next step would be to be tested in an emergency room.
The Boston hospital initially used Spot simply to carry an iPad that was placed on his "face," allowing doctors to talk to patients who were on their way to the hospital and assess who needed immediate care. The robot works remotely using a portable device, according to MIT News.
But in a new report, MIT researchers say they have proven that Spot can measure pulses, temperature and receive other diagnostic data from a distance of more than 1.8 meters. To achieve this, they developed the VitalCam, four different cameras mounted on the Spot.
An infrared camera measures temperature and breathing rate, even through a mask, while three other cameras filter different wavelengths of light to measure the pulses and oxygen saturation in the blood.
Spot's abilities have only been tested on healthy subjects, but the team says it's ready for real-world application.
Even if it meets the conditions for FDA approval, VitalCam could save time, resources and potentially save lives.
"In robotics, one of our goals is to use automation and robotic technology to remove people from dangerous jobs," Henwei Huang, an MIT graduate student working on the project, said in a statement. "We thought we should be able to use a robot to remove the care worker from the risk of direct exposure to the patient."
The aim is for Spot to be able to be used to allow doctors to continue to monitor patients without going to their room.
Funded by MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, the study was published on the preprint server techRxiv, but has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical or scientific journal, the procedure used to publish studies in scientific inspections.
Source: iefimerida.gr
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