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Robot Takes Contact-Free Measurements of Patients' Vital Signs


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Robot Spot, who measures patients' vital signs without contact, in the halls of Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brigham and Womens Hospital hope to reduce the risk to healthcare workers posed by Covid-19 by using robots like this one to remotely measure patients vital signs.

Credit: MIT News

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Brigham and Women's Hospital are using dog-like robots from Boston Dynamics to remotely measure patients' vital signs.

The robots, equipped with four cameras and a tablet, can measure a person’s vital signs from a distance of 2 meters.

Algorithms enable an infrared camera to measure elevated skin temperature and breathing rate while accounting for ambient temperature and the distance between the camera and the patient.

Measurements from three monochrome cameras that each filter a different wavelength of light are used to calculate pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation.

Said MIT's Henwei Huang, "We didn't really develop new technology to do the measurements. What we did is integrate them together very specifically for the Covid application, to analyze different vital signs at the same time."

From MIT News
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