Robot nurses will attend to COVID-19 patients at the COVID First Line Treatment Centre (CFLTC), Nattika, the biggest such centre in the State with 1,400 beds.
The Government Engineering College, Thrissur, has deployed six robot nurses at the centre. The college has also developed an e-bike for food distribution and a patient management software for the centre.
A team of young engineers, Sourav P.S. , Aswin Kumar K., Tony C .Abraham, Ajay Aravind, and Sidharth V. developed the robot. While Muhammad Arif O.S.; Evin Wilson; Glinz George ,and Pranav Balachandran developed the e-bike, Kowsik Nandagopan, Irshad P.I., and Arun Jishnu are the brain behind the patient management software. Dr. Ajay James, Assistant Professor, is their mentor.
The same team has developed “Sanitizer Kunjappan”, a robot for sanitisation; aerosol box and WISK for collecting samples from people for COVID-19 tests. The project is funded by NABARD under the Rural Infrastructure Promotion Fund (RIPF) and implemented under the leadership of Dr. Satheeshan T.V., District Programme Manager, Arogyakeralam, Thrissur.
“The automatic robot nurse is an implementation of the industrial line follower robot. This robot is capable of taking health values like temperature, pressure and oxygen levels of patients. Such robots with automated controls and minimum human assistance can cover a large number of patients in a single stretch. The robot can work in three shifts to monitor patients. It can cover about 250 patients in a shift. The doctors can communicate with patients using the telemedicine feature implemented in it,” explained Dr. Ajay James.
The robot can not only reduce the workload of the medical staff in monitoring the patients but can also check the chances of infection. It can check whether a patient is active in a bed or not. The robots can also interact with patients and their needs can be communicated with the control centre. The patient status, values, and details can be transferred to the control centre. The robots are deployed in each section with 200 beds.
The e-bike is a manned vehicle, which is able to carry food and other materials inside the COVID-19 centre. About 100 kg can be carried at a single stretch, which empowers the CFLTC in efficient distribution of food in the minimum time. As it is an electric bike, it does not have problems such as pollution and noise disturbances.
A patient management software developed for making bed allocation and patient management efficient is also deployed in the CFLTC. It has features such as a pictorial layout of beds, patients’ register and communication channel for data transfer between the control centre and nursing stations.
