'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Covid-19 Patients | Hacker News Reader

'Spot': A Robot That Could Help Doctors Remotely Treat Covid-19 Patients

npr.org

15 pointsbottle219 comments

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Spot eliminates the potential for virus transmission, especially if it's performing up-close checking of vitals on multiple patients.

Granted, Spot can't contract or respirate COVID-19, so it doesn't need a mask or a gown, but unless it's taking a rubbing alcohol bath between each patient visit, couldn't the virus still be transmitted via surface contact?

It doesn’t breathe and it’s easier to wipe clean, which pretty much makes it impossible to transmit Covid. Don’t know how it takes vitals, but they probably use clean instruments for each test one can assume.

I'm assuming that they can use some relatively harsh chemicals on the robot that wouldn't necessarily be safe for a person. And obviously not being able to respirate the illness is a significant improvement.

I do not understand the purpose of this. Can't the patients simply make a video call with their smartphones?

I mean, if spot had a small barrel with brandy around his neck, just like the St. Bernhard dogs allegedly did, now that would be something...

From the github repo[0]: - Telepresence and telemedicine - Remote vital inspection - Disinfecting hospital rooms - Internal delivery

[0] https://github.com/boston-dynamics/bosdyn-hospital-bot

Something simpler can work just as well or much easier and this holds for many many problems or tasks. To do dishes, we do not have robot arms holding a brush but dishwashers. Think of a Roomba vs. robot with a sweeper etc. Instead of a robot stocking shelves in a super market, just have home delivery and cut out the shelves entirely. Cooking robots vs. microwave meals.

The issue with all of the above is that each of those can only do 1 task (and do it well). Humans can do multiple things well while reusing the same bits for multiple tasks. A mopping and a vacuum robot are very much alike and share a huge portion of the software and hardware. <strike>Robots</strike> Tools like a Roomba need to be cheap enough to warrant their cost for a task you only need a X times a week/day/moth/year. So, a Roomba is has to be cheap enough. Spot (and other robots) are more expensive but also more versatile and should be capable of doing more tasks.

But, finally, robots bringing beer, yes, the holy grail of robotics!

This is your monthly reminder that Boston Dynamics is exceptionally good at product demos.

It remains much less clear that they’re any good at anything else.

Also, Spot looks like a Houndeye to me, so i keep waiting for it to make “wheeeennnnnnn BAM” noises.

> It remains much less clear that they’re any good at anything else.

They are also exceptionally good at building impressive robots.

Not to be too blunt here, but: besides very impressive numbers of youtube views, what have those robots accomplished, in a “we have deployed X thousand of these in the following Y situations” sense, since 2006?

I’m (way more than) fine with blue sky work, and BD deserves credit for not building weapons, but at the same time there’s an impedance mismatch here.

If you're interested Adam Savage was allowed to use a 'Spot' robot for several months and shares some observations and information on actual usage on his youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-PdPtqw78k

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/boston-dynamics-puts-its-r...

reading between the lines, as of Q4 last year they're still in _extremely_ early in any meaningful deployment. Lease-based alpha access to select customers, "hey we don't have to send a 12-man team out every month anymore", and carefully PRd information is certainly some kind of progress, but it's not anything like normal use.

Definitely not normal use, probably something akin to controlled alpha or beta testing. The only recent article a saw about the fall 2019 trials/leases was this article that didn't provide any meaningful details on usage.

https://www.officer.com/command-hq/technology/article/211286...

If I saw this escapee from a Metal Gear game coming in to check up on me, my first instinct would be to run, or perhaps hide under the nearest cardboard box of sufficient size.

Also makes me think of Half Life

I wonder if it would make sense to use the telepresence bots from Double Robotics for something like this. It seems to have similar capabilities (I'm assuming there aren't many stairs on the hospital floor) and costs an order of magnitude less: https://www.doublerobotics.com/

I wonder how it is cleaned. Parts of it look like they might be hard to clean effectively. Is it water resistant and capable of being (safely) sprayed down with a disinfectant?

Why not have wheels?

What is it that makes spot better at telepresence, telemedicine, remote vital inspection, internal delivery or disinfecting hospital rooms than, say, a roomba platform?

The main picture seems like something out of a science fiction nightmare

We've been living in a science fiction nightmare since 2016, I think.

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