Robotics in Simulated COVID-19 Patient Room for Health Care Worker Effector Tasks: Preliminary, Feasibility Experiments

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has strained health care systems and personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies globally. We hypothesized that a collaborative robot system could perform health care worker effector tasks inside a simulated intensive care unit (ICU) patient room, which could theoretically reduce both PPE use and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) exposures. We planned a prospective proof-of-concept feasibility and design pilot study to test 5 discrete medical tasks in a simulated ICU room of a COVID-19 patient using a collaborative robot: push a button on intravenous pole machine when alert occurs for downstream occlusion, adjust ventilator knob, push button on ICU monitor to silence false alerts, increase oxygen flow on wall-mounted flow meter to allow the patient to walk to the bathroom and back (dial-up and dial-down oxygen flow), and push wallmounted nurse call button. Feasibility was defined as task completion robotically. A training period of 45 minutes to 1 hour was needed to program the system de novo for each task. In less than 30 days, the team completed 5 simple effector task experiments robotically. Selected collaborative robotic effector tasks appear feasible in a simulated ICU room of the COVID-19 patient. Theoretically, this robotic approach could reduce PPE use and staff SARS-CoV-2 exposure. It requires future validation and health care worker learning similar to other ICU device training.

Assessment and Review of the Reactive Mobile Robot Navigation

“…Paediatrics is one of the branches that has benefited from robotic assistance currently available or being developed in a variety of settings [5]. At the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, robots were used well to examine people and care for patients, and all of this was aimed at reducing the transmission of infection [6]. -Industrial application: Mobile robots have been used widely in industrial applications.…”

“…An experimental combination between Genetic algorithm and matrix binary code representation was used to solve path planning for dynamic obstacle avoidance and reduce the path distance by about 16% using Khepeara-II mobile robot [16]. Matrix Genetic Algorithm (MGA) was compared with FL (Fuzzy Logic), ANN (Artificial Neural Network), (ant colony optimization) ACO and the result shows that MGA has shorter path and execution time as shown in Figure (6).…”

IoT-based Covid-19 Patient Service Robot Design

“…This conceptual model research includes human services in hotels [7]. In addition, analysis has also been carried out related to robot simulations for patients with Covid-19; This robot carries out activities related to patient care in the inpatient room [6].…”

“…Accompanied by the increasingly spreading virus, the application of technology in the modern world is also moving massively to apply ideas that can solve various human problems, including in the health sector [6], [7].…”

“…In this industrial era 4.0, one of the technologies that are developing is the presence of Internet of Things (IoT) technology [9], [10]. IoT can be collaborated with the concept of robotics to answer current problems, especially in the health sector in helping medical personnel serve patients' needs, especially during treatment [6].…”