The ongoing pandemic has brought everything to a standstill. Our country is facing a shortage of doctors and nurses to vaccinate and take care of patients of Covid19. Plus, those doing so have to cover themselves completely from head to toe whilst also facing the risk of exposure to the virus. To have someone like Big Hero 6’s Baymax come and say, “Hello. I am Baymax, your personal healthcare companion,” in such a situation, would be an ideal help which would help fulfil all our requirements! It is indeed an amazing concept of having a ‘robotic nurse’ to help people in distress which could perform tasks performed by human nurses with much more efficiency and ease. Having such a robot with a comprehensive A.I. could be of tremendous help to victims of earthquakes, floods, wars, etc. where it would be difficult to have human nurses for care. A team at Duke University has been trying to (kind of) make a real nurse of this sort. The School of Engineering and School of Nursing at Duke is working on a two-armed robot named the Tele-Robotic Intelligent Nursing Assistant (TRINA, for short). The robot was designed to assist nurses in high-risk healthcare situations. They came up with it in 2014 in response to an Ebola outbreak, and the robot features a screen for a face that displays the human operator’s face (for the personal, robotic touch). It’s still in the early stages, obviously, but they believe TRINA could be a fantastic surrogate for real-life nurses in dangerous (or contagious) situations. . . . . . Credits: Krushi Panchal
