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

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

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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 Nasal Strips 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 Body Kit patient to walk to the bathroom and back (dial-up and dial-down oxygen flow), and push wall-mounted 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.