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Man diagnosed with coronavirus near Seattle is being treated largely by a robot
- xattt 7y agoFinally, a work-from-home solution for Nursing!
- ceejayoz 7y agoThey've had these telepresence robots for a while. Good for this scenario - reducing contact with an infectious patient - and super useful for rural clinics that might not be able to staff an in-person full-time doc.
- beobab 7y ago"Please state the nature of the medical emergency"
- Merrill 7y agoIt doesn't look like a robot in the sense that it cannot move or manipulate anything. It looks more like a conventional nursing terminal station fitted with a video camera for remotely viewing the patient. There doesn't even seem to be an input device for the patient to use other than voice?
- ceejayoz 7y agoNursing terminals tend to have keyboards, and I'm not sure what input device you'd expect a patient to use other than voice and camera - you don't touch an in-person doctor, do you? If the back two wheels are motorized, it could readily move itself around (and non-mobile robots are still robots; ask any factory worker). It looks fairly similar to this telepresence robot from Cisco: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaboration-endpoints/telepresence-clinical-presence-system/data_sheet_c78-648400.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaborat...
- java-man 7y agoWho is going to clean the robot??
- deaps 7y agorobot.clean_self()
- zentiggr 7y agoDefine the protocol, and leave the implementation to those pesky engineers :)
- ceejayoz 7y agoOne of these UV disinfectant robots: http://www.uvd-robots.com/ http://www.uvd-robots.com/
- hiccuphippo 7y agoIt's robots all the way down.
- java-man 7y agocould not clean the rollers
- ceejayoz 7y agoIt's still likely to be an improvement. I tend to doubt hospital janitorial staff are cleaning bed/equipment wheels between every patient currently, let alone things like the ceiling tiles.
- giarc 7y agoThe robot (self driving) part of it is just unnecessary. Why complicate things when there are staff in the hospital (porters) whose sole job is to move patients and equipment around the hospital. I say this as an infection control professional who works in a hospital and has experience with this type of technology.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoThe weird thing is that nursing staff move the robot around in the room. I guess they get dressed up in suitable isolation suits?
- soylentcola 7y agoI read it as nurses remotely moving the robot around from outside the room so they didn't risk contact.
- ghostpepper 7y agoThat makes more sense. I was also confused by the wording in the article.
- cfqycwz 7y agoI think it actually is nurses physically moving the device around the room—the photo looks like it's just on casters, not motorized wheels.
- nimbius 7y agoWhenever I see these outbreak stories (sars, mers, etc..) and it affects a US citizen, I always wonder who actually pays for this level of intensive care. Ambulance trips in the states are routinely $3,000. my trip to the ER after a wreck was $3800. If you dont have insurance, how do you pay for an "isopod" and a quarantine with a medical robot? What reasonable insurance company would ever cover these expenses? (mine hardly covers birth control.) Healthcare is private here. When i go to the hospital they ask if "i am a member." Do these treatments take place at in-network facilities? is there such a thing as an in-network facility for being quarantined with an incurable new disease? Can I be compelled to pay for health services in this case if i DO NOT want them? Its at least reassuring to see CNN is dancing around the HIPAA implicationf of misidentifying or identifying the patient...although I wonder if its only because they recently emerged from a slander/libel lawsuit for painting a highschool kid from kentucky as a racist during a rally.
- mdorazio 7y ago> who actually pays for this level of intensive care If you have decent insurance, you pay your maximum out of pocket and insurance pays the rest (at negotiated rates). If you don't have decent insurance, you declare bankruptcy and the hospital ends up paying for all except the few dollars they are able to get out of you. This is pretty much the same situation as when homeless people show up at an ER, which is legally obligated to help them regardless of ability to pay.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoIf the healthcare providers are in network, i.e. the insurance company and the providers have reached a pricing agreement. Otherwise the providers can bill you whatever they want.
- duxup 7y agoI think it is VERY hard to tell what is "decent insurance" anymore. It might say that your hospital stay is covered on paper ... but then at the hospital the robot (or another doctor) might not be billed through the hospital and some outside group that is suddenly out of network.... there's no way to know.
- ssully 7y agoSlightly related and not worth it's own post, but someone in Chicago has been diagnosed with the coronavirus, making them the second person in the US with it. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-coronavirus-china-epidemic-illinois-case-20200124-yx2xd3yeovar3o25ei6bfvvbze-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-coronavirus-...
- Cynddl 7y agoSadly not available in Europe. Three years after GDPR and these big news outlets still haven't figure how to provide content without invasive privacy breaches. > Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- koheripbal 7y agoOur company website is the same. We just decided it wasn't worth it to cater to EU users, so we geo-blocked the whole continent.
- llamataboot 7y agoCan someone explain why /this/ level of isolation is necessary? I understand that comparison of mortality rates is difficult, so this does seem "more deadly" than the flu, but likely we have no idea of the actual number of people with it, both for reporting reasons and because many people may just have minor symptoms. But, if we use SARS as a comparison which also had this level of pandemic fear+isolation (and was way way worse handled in China at the beginning) I think final stats were like 1000 deaths worldwide. Compare that to what, over 2k deaths in just the US every year from the flu? I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned (it is new and unknown, and seems to have a higher mortality rate than other viruses) but it seems this level of treatment (and entire city-wide lockdowns in China right now) is like Ebola level precautions for what seems like a difficult but fairly standard level respiratory virus? Honestly curious here from medical professionals/epidemiologists..
- viklove 7y agoIt's a new virus, so we don't really know what it'll do, do we? Maybe it has a 100% mortality rate after 180 days -- we won't know until more time has passed. This is like introducing new code into a system. You have no idea what it's going to do in the long run, and all you can do is patch it out or wait to see what problems it causes in the long run.
- throwaway5752 7y agoIt is a new coronavirus, it's not an alien. Coronaviruses cause the common seasonal cold, too, and are endemic in multiple commercial livestock populations. Please don't spread bad information if you don't have the background to talk about it.
- afjl 7y agoThis doesn't sounds like bad information to me, especially considering the lack of conclusive, empirical information on death rates, pathology, etc. It just sounds like normal speculation to me. For example, initial reports only days ago claimed that human-to-human transmission was not possible, but that's been disproved already. Combine that with the government's mismanagement of SARS/African swine fever, and you've got plenty of reason to speculate.
- yellow_lead 7y agoI would like to take this moment to say that the virus is very serious and any people thinking of traveling to China in the next few months should strongly reconsider. Death counts and infected counts coming out of China seem to not be very accurate, as they don't match other organization's models.