This appeared last week:
The robot doctor helping treat hospital patients during a pandemic
By Stuart Layt
May 7, 2020 — 3.07pm
Temi, the newest addition to the medical staff at Brisbane’s Greenslopes hospital, never gets tired, never gets sick and is always there for patients.
Because Temi is a robot.
More specifically, Temi is a telepresence robot, a semi-autonomous platform doctors can use during situations such as pandemics to remain socially distant from patients while still giving one-on-one treatment.
The hospital’s Emergency Centre director, Dr Mark Baldwin, said patients had been reacting well to the newest doctor on the wards since two Temi units had been put into action over the past few weeks.
“The problem we have is staff have to wear personal protective equipment when they’re talking to patients, and patients can find that quite impersonal at times,” Dr Baldwin said.
“The patients say it is actually more personable to interact with an unmasked face, even if it’s on a screen, especially as it moves with them.”
In addition to improving interaction with patients, using Temi means the risk of any disease spreading is greatly reduced and the hospital conserves much-needed PPE.
Dr Baldwin proposed putting something like the Temi robots in place when the pandemic began, and the hospital’s CEO Chris Went gave him the OK, but said she never expected to have the robots in place so quickly.
“I said great, take the corporate card and buy a couple!” she said.
“We’re limited in who can visit patients in hospital due to health requirements, so we can use Temi to get relatives to people’s bedsides, so there’s a whole range of uses for our robots.”
Dr Baldwin said he believed Greenslopes was the only hospital in Queensland currently using telepresence robots, although it is understood some others are also planning to roll the bots out in the near future.
Overseas, similar robots have been used to conduct initial screenings of potential virus patients, with some Chinese hospitals using them to check patients’ temperatures to screen for fevers.
Temi can navigate itself around the ward without human intervention, and can lock on and move with a patient as needed.
It is about the height of a patient in a chair or bed, and features a main screen through which the medical professional can talk to the patient, as well as a little tray behind the monitor which can carry medical equipment, medications or sanitiser and masks.
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Certainly we are seeing all sorts of innovation in these testing times. I wonder what the ADHA has managed to bring to the surface with their Innovation Challenge?
David.
Seen these in action they are a small step towards what will become quite normal in the next decade or two. As for ADHA my guess the winner will be the automation of long government forms using adobe, accessible through a facebook like user interface. Platform natural so long as it is not IOS.
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