Widespread use of such systems could act as a surrogate in place of real physical interaction during periods of high risk of disease transmission. This enables robots to act as a physical link between people who cannot come into close contact. Robotics and other autonomous systems offer the distinct advantage of uncoupling physical interactions between people by providing the option of interaction-at-a-distance. Uses have been proposed and developed ranging from assistance during Ebola outbreaks ( Yang et al., 2020) to supporting children during their stay in a hospital ( Joseph et al., 2018). Robotics is a promising area of research that can contribute to an effective response to pandemic across a variety of health care scenarios. Here we describe an end-to-end robotics solution to break the physical isolation of lockdown in long-term care and similar facilities. ![]() The longer-term consequences of this physical and social isolation on the mental wellness of the aging population is not yet known. Although effective at reducing the risk of transmission into the resident population, this approach has the unwanted consequence of isolating residents from loved ones at a profoundly stressful time. One common strategy has been near-complete lockdown of such facilities. Since senior citizens account for 77% of the deaths related to SARS-CoV-2 ( NIA, 2020), there was an immediate need early in the pandemic to reduce the rate of transmission to people who live in care facilities for the elderly and the care-givers who work with them. Of these, 10,549 cases were staff at long-term care facilities and 18,940 were residents of such facilities. For example, as of September 2020 there have been just over 146,000 cases in Canada. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has affected people all over the globe, it has had a disproportionately strong effect on the aging population and their care givers. This burden faced by health-care workers is compounded when those workers are responsible for the mental and physical health of aging patients. For example in China, a study that surveyed health care workers in hospitals found that half of the employees were depressed (50.7%), close to half of them had anxiety (44.7%), over a third of them suffered from insomnia (36.1%) ( Li et al., 2020), and a little under three quarter of them were facing psychological distress ( Tomlin et al., 2020). Of particular importance and concern is the role of front-line health care workers in spreading the virus ( Casini et al., 2019) and the extra burden placed on those workers in situations of high transmission risk. On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 to be a global pandemic ( Huang et al., 2020), however the transmission and impact of the virus has varied tremendously across regional, racial, and socioeconomic boundaries. This enabled us to test the effect of face masks on speech recognition interfaces in the context of autonomous systems. We then used this dataset to evaluate the speech recognition system. We also recorded a speech dataset with two conditions: the talker wearing a face mask and the talker not wearing a face mask. We demonstrate an end-to-end delivery test, and an in-depth evaluation of the speech interface. The system is automated to reduce the burden on facility staff, and it is controlled entirely through hands-free audio interaction in order to reduce transmission of the virus. ![]() The research presented in this paper demonstrates a speech-controlled, self-sanitizing robot that enables the delivery of items from a visitor to a resident of a care facility. Robotics is a promising area of research that can assist in reducing the spread of covid-19, while also preventing the need for complete physical isolation. Near-complete lockdown has been a common strategy to reduce the spread of the pandemic in environments such as live-in care facilities. ![]() The major effect on health-care workers and the vulnerable populations they serve has been of particular concern. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a widespread effect across the globe.
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