The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus is a fluid situation that is threatening lives at a much faster pace than we could have thought about. The deadly coronavirus outbreak has pushed the medical community around the world to quickly adopt technical solutions as medical assistants. To stop the spread of the infection, various medtech companies are coming up with robots and drones to help medical staff to provide services and care to those quarantined or practicing social distancing.
As a response to fight this outbreak of COVID-19 pneumonia that began in Wuhan, the capital city of central China’s Hubei province in December 2019 and spread to the rest of the world, information technologies are playing a pivotal role. From proactive surveillance for rapid detection/diagnosis of infection to immediate isolation, rigorous contact tracing, quarantine of the close contacts, high awareness, and acceptance of the measures among the general public are the measures that are being adopted by various tech and robotics companies like cloudmind to combat the situation. Adding to it, telemedicine, AI, drones, robots, and big data are being employed to fight COVID-19 to aid public safety authorities, health authorities and businesses.
In some Chinese cities like Yinchuan, the 5G-powered patrolling robots and drones (integrating IoT, AI, cloud computing, and big data technologies) have been deployed for monitoring the spread of infection, reminding people to wash their hands and ensuring that people are wearing masks. The high-performance industrial edge computer with an 8th gen Intel Core processor and a GPU iModule makes it possible to roll out smart robots with a lot of computing power and high performance.
Additionally, various robots and drones are being used to monitor citizens’ body temperatures in public places. Guangzhou Gosuncn Robot Company which is a leading provider of smart city IoT products and services has upgraded its already existing police patrol robots developed to assist first-line responders in conducting disease prevention inspections and exercises.
Then there are robots with high-resolution cameras and infrared thermometers that are capable of scanning the temperatures of up to 10 people simultaneously (in the radius of 5 meters). In case, these robots discover someone without a mask or someone who has a high temperature, an alert is sent to the authorities. These robots can be controlled remotely to ensure saving the manpower, reducing the pressure on already stretched emergency services and limiting the potential for cross-infection. The telepresence robots equipped with high-quality cameras are enabling remote video communication, monitoring patients’ health, and delivering critical medical goods to the hospitals in a safe and contact-free manner.
Food delivery service Ele.me has been using robots to deliver meals to quarantined people. UVD robots are helping in disinfecting the rooms. These robots emit an ultraviolet light throughout an area to kill viruses and bacteria without exposing any human being to infection.
Drones from Shenzhen Company, MicroMultiCopter are patrolling areas and observing crowds and traffic efficiently. Another way drones are used to fight coronavirus is by spraying disinfectant in public spaces. Through thermal sensing, drones are also helping officials with crowd management and in identifying people with high body temperatures, thereby indicating that they are infected.
In an outbreak, the scale of COVID-19 robots and drones is rising and increasingly becoming essential support for human beings to fight the virus.
