As the state of Karnataka faces a shortage of doctors, the state is likely to turn towards technology and deploy robots to monitor COVID-19 patients.
The newly converted 10,000 bed COVID Care Facility at the Bangalore International Exhibition Center which will house mild and asymptomatic patients will now have robots as doctors. The robots are being built on the model of telepresence. Even though the robots are originally from the US, they are assembled in Karnataka. A demo of the same was given on Wednesday. The nodal officer for labs and testing of the COVID-19 task force, Dr. CN Manjunath said that the robots will now be used to treat patients and can be remotely connected to a team of specialist doctors. He said,
“A demo will be given at Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research on Thursday and the pilot project will also be taken up there. Each robot costs close to Rs. 10-11 lakh rupees. It’s available for rent also. One robot could be sued for 200 patients.”
The robots are app-based and the doctors controlling it need to download an application on their phones. Through the robot, the doctors can converse with the patients and monitor them. The robots are therefore expected to ease the burden of the doctors by doing virtual rounds as thousands of patients can be managed with minimal human resources.
City Losing Its Grip
The city which was hailed at the early stages for its success for containing COVID-19 has seen a massive surge in cases in the last two weeks.
This was expected given the unlock phase 1 where people were bound to move from one region to another which would convert into a spike in the cases. The matter of concern for Bengaluru is the sharpness of this increase. In the last 11 days, the city has seen an increase of 9,427 cases which is 40 percent of the total cases reported in Karnataka. The city has seen at least 500 cases every day since the 27th of June.
As per experts, Bengaluru is a perfect case study of things going wrong. The president of the Public Health Foundation of India, Professor K Srinath Reddy has attributed the increase to two reasons – people failing to adhere to social distancing norms and the lack of preparedness by authorities.
Source: The Times of India
