In India, androids on the front line against Covid-19

Invento Robotics, a Bangalore-based company, has designed three robot models capable of performing a range of tasks including disinfecting surfaces, answering patient questions, enabling remote consultations and video calls. The most popular model is Mitra, which in Hindi means “friend”. It costs $ 10,000 and is equipped with facial recognition systems to remember the names and faces of the patients it interacts with. It can move autonomously in the wards, and thanks to its cameras and the screen on the chest it can put patients locked in bed both with doctors who can talk to us at a distance – thus reducing risky and unnecessary contacts – and with relatives. Mitra is also able to read vital signs on the monitor, and to give brief instructions to hospitalized people, such as reminding them to take certain medications at certain times. “It’s ironic how using humanoid robots can help us bring humanity back to hospitals,” said Invento Robotics CEO Balaji Viswanathan. But if we think of the hospital management of the pandemic, with isolated wards, doctors and nurses covered with infinite layers of protection and masks to minimize the risk of contagion, human contacts reduced to a minimum, interacting with a robot with a human shape can be not only positive. on a practical level but also for the mood of the patients. And in fact from the Yatharth Hospital in Noida, in the north of the country, where two different Mitra are employed both in the triage for symptom screening and in the intensive care unit, they report a very positive welcome from patients, who are happy to interact with robots and often take pictures with them. Invento Robotics is a family business. At the top are Viswanatahn and his wife Mahalakshmi Radhakrushnun, who moved to Bangalore in 2016 after training in Boston. They combined their experience in industry and robotics to bring their androids to life for hospitals and nursing homes. But until the outbreak of the pandemic they had struggled to establish themselves in this field. They then turned to the banking branch, providing robots that could identify visitors, provide access passes and collect user feedback.With the arrival of the Covid-19 epidemic, which counts over 8 million in India cases and 120 thousand deaths, the added value of non-human helpers has begun to be understood in hospitals. Invento Robotics is not the only Indian company to have invested in the field of android development during the coronavirus emergency. Milagrow Robotics, specialized in robots for domestic cleaning, has designed a model capable of being used in a hospital environment for sanitation. For its part, Asimov Robotics, based in Kerala, created a robot that could go around the wards to distribute medicines and perform cleaning tasks.