'In addition to hospitals, we're being contacted by urgent care centers, hotels, government agencies and pharmaceutical companies' to disinfect rooms. 'We are getting requests from around the world,' Hart said. Xenex's LightStrike robots have been used in more than 500 healthcare facilities, with the number of deployed bots rising due to the pandemic, Hart said. US firm Xenex has seen a surge in demand for its robots that disinfect rooms, according to director of media relations Melinda Hart. Robotic machines can also be sent to scan for the presence of the virus, such as when the Diamond Princess cruise ship cabins were checked for safety weeks after infected passengers were evacuated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control.Īdditionally, hospitals are turning to robots to tirelessly rid room, halls and door handles of viruses and bacteria. Some consultation robots even tend to the classic checkup task of listening to patients' lungs as they breathe. Patients in hospitals in Thailand, Israel and elsewhere meet with robots for consultations done by doctors via videoconference.

The smart clinic only handled patients for a few days, but it foreshadowed a future in which robots tend to patients with contagious diseases while health care workers manage from safe distances. Patients wore wristbands that gathered blood pressure and other vital data. 'The smart field hospital was completely run by robots.'Ī small medical team remotely controlled the field hospital robots. 'It provided useful information, conversational engagement, entertainment with dancing, and even led patients through stretching exercises,' CloudMinds president Karl Zhao said of the humanoid robot. Meals were served, temperatures taken and communications handled by machines, one of them named 'Cloud Ginger' by its maker CloudMinds, which has operations in Beijing and California. One team of robots temporarily cared for patients in a makeshift hospital in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the COVID-19 outbreak began.

War robot 2020