- 'Ethiran' can protect vulnerable healthcare staff from person-to-person transmission
- It can supply of medicines and food to patients, perform UV sterilization along its movement path, and non-contact temperature screening with an infrared thermometer
- The robot will available on rent basis as well as for sale to hospitals and orphanages
After successfully helping the nation in the battle against COVID-19 through CK-100 drones, team Garuda along with the students of Agni College of Technology makes a shift towards the development of robot nurse named as ‘Agni’s Ethiran’ to provide support to the healthcare workers and medical professionals who are most vulnerable to the virus due to their frontline exposure to the patients.
It is forecast that in the imminent future the robots will supplant numerous individuals in their occupations and the outbreak of COVID-19 is accelerating the procedure. As of now, with the upsurge in COVID positive cases, various organizations are extending the utilisation of robots to expand social distancing and lessen the number of staff to physically visit the workplace. In such a crucial time, the emergence of ‘Ethiran’ turns out to be a major support to the medical sector.
Speaking to the Machine Maker, Agnishwar Jayaprakash, Vice Chairman of Agni College of Technology (Chennai) said, “The healthcare workers are consistently at high risk of catching COVID-19 and it is not a fair deal at all. We wanted to do something that will make things less risky as well as make their jobs easier. The robot nurse is essentially the brainchild of students of the college, which they created with the support of technical engineers from Garuda and the professors of Agni College.”
Agnishwar Jayaprakash, an inspiring youth leader is not just the Vice Chairman of Agni College of Technology but also the founder of Garuda Aerospace (a drone start-up) and Director of Agni Estates and Foundation. At the point when he had the plan to begin Garuda, it was Agni College of Technology where it began getting incubated, and along these lines Garuda has consistently been able to intently work with various student engineers with splendid ideas and one such idea to combat COVID-19 was ‘Ethiran’.
About Ethiran
Agni’s Ethiran is a user friendly and cost-effective BOT that has been designed to break the chain of Corona pandemic. This can substitute healthcare workers who supply medicines, food, and other essentials to the patients at the hospitals and even at old age homes. It can even viably serve markets, orphanages to avoid direct contact with a person.
We wanted to ensure that every single organisation can afford this for their sanitization purposes, especially government medical centres and hospitals with a large number of quarantined facilities
Agnishwar Jayaprakash
Vice Chairman, Agni College of Technology and Founder, Garuda Aerospace
Some of the key highlights of the BOT are it does UV sterilization of the path it traverses, it is equipped with night vision capability and possess the capacity to work faster than an individual without fatigue. It ensures effective protection of healthcare workers by breaking the chain of transmission from person to person and furthermore checks the temperature of a patient using a non-contact infrared thermometer.
Features and Mechanism
The Robot nurse is a humanoid framework device that weighs around 15 kgs and has a height of 5 feet. It is equipped with controller ATMEGA 328P, 4s 3000mah Li-Po battery, motors for movement, 20 cm radius wheel, audio transmitter-receiver, infrared sensors, a tray for carrying medicinal stuffs, ultrasonic sensor, voice recognization module, MLX90614 Sensor and Caster wheel. Explaining the device, Agnishwar added that the BOT is rectangular in shape with a tray attached to it and generally utilises the sensors to follow the path and record the temperature of a patient. Further, it uses a micro-controller to move with a speed of 7 km/hour approximately and even motor control to automatically dispense the food and medicine tray on a patient’s table.
After finishing its duty it returns to its original place using the same proximity sensors and it can either be operated automatically through programming or by a remote controller. Apart from this, it has an attached camera for visualisation and audio transmitter-receiver to transmit audio commands/messages and it operates on the battery power for continuously about 3 hours.
The mechanism used is motor control in left, right, back and front movements with the help of the wheels attached to the BOT, and has the capacity to deliver material up to 5 kgs
Difficulties Confronted
Portraying the challenges faced by the team, he referenced that sourcing parts at affordable rates during the lockdown was an obstacle because the economy isn’t in a decent state. “We always focus on ‘Make in India’ and these are difficult times where getting materials from abroad to assemble a robotic nurse was next to impossible. That is the point at which we needed to experiment with different avenues regarding something in-house and something that would be financially effective too”, says Agnishwar. He further included that Garuda was able to step in at the right time and do its bit in sourcing material for the engineers to build the nurse robot within time to be useful to combat Covid-19. “Despite many difficulties, we had many engineers step up for the cause and got support and guidance from professors who are experts in the field of Robotics”, says Agnishwar.
They have received numerous enquiries about the robot from many hospitals in Mumbai and Chennai and presently are in the process of running demos. He stated that few of the hospitals want the robots on a rental basis whereas, some want to have their own fleet. They will proceed depending on the need for the same to assemble and customise more.
Other Innovations
Currently, the student engineers of Agni college, in association with others, are working on a One-point Sanitization Chamber which is an intelligent biofilter chamber for sanitisation of personnel at various entry points in offices, factories, malls, hospitals, etc named as ‘Vaayu'. It basically sanitises a person from top to bottom in a swift manner and saves time and manpower. It even helps in cleaning the hands, face, shoes, disinfect the clothes, etc.
For more details contact: agnisvaayu@gmail.com