Spot The Robot Dog Roams The Coronavirus Pandemic’s Front Lines

Spot, the famous robot dog from Boston Dynamics, has been conscripted into service to work on the front lines helping medical professionals battling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Engineers at the company, which was formerly a subsidiary of Google before being purchased by Softbank, have been working for the past six weeks to develop the means for Spot to help reduce the exposure of healthcare workers.

So far Spot has been working with Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where robots outfitted with a special payload are deployed in triage tents and parking lots to help staff receive patients suspected to have COVID-19 and perform initial assessments.

“With the use of a mobile robot, hospitals are able to reduce the number of necessary medical staff at the scene and conserve their limited PPE supply,” explains a release from Boston Dynamics.

“Through an iPad and a two-way radio mounted on a robot’s back, healthcare providers can video conference with patients as they remotely direct the mobile robot through lines of sick individuals in the tents.”

Doctors can speak to patients from their office or even their homes via Spot. Each shift in which Spot is on the job and tele-operated is one less healthcare worker potentially coming into contact with the disease.

Next up the robot will move from serving as a mobile avatar for a human healthcare worker to performing some of the same in-person functions. Boston Dynamics hopes Spot will be able to collect vital signs such as body temperature, respiratory rate, pulse and oxygen levels.

Much of this could be done using thermal cameras, no need to fear a headless robot dog shoving a thermometer in your ear.

The company is also investigating attaching a UV-C light or other technology that might be able to disinfect surfaces or decontaminate other spaces.

The hardware and software designs have also been open-sourced and posted online for developers with their own ideas for how robots might be able to help.

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