W Singhbhum DDC develops cov-bot, isolation bed

B Sridhar | TNN | Apr 16, 2020, 06:00 IST

Jamshedpur: The West Singhbhum district administration has designed a remote-controlled robot that can carry food and medicines to patients at the isolation ward of the railway hospital in Chakradharpur, which has been converted into a Covid-19 hospital. The robot has been named Covid robot or cov-bot.
Inaugurated on Tuesday, the battery-operated device is equipped with a close-circuit camera and a speaker for two-way communication. The load carrying capacity of the robot is 30kg.
A brainchild of West Singhbhum deputy development commissioner (DDC) Aditya Ranjan, it has been developed by him with help from four other engineers of the district rural development agency (DRDA).
Ranjan said, “The robot can move freely within a radius of 300 feet and can be operated remotely. We needed Rs 25,000 to develop the robot, but its usefulness in minimising human contact and thereby checking the spread of the novel coronavirus is priceless.”
The group led by the DDC has also developed an innovative isolation bed. “The conventional iron bed has been covered with a polythene sheet tightly from all four corners and this helps in reducing the risk of droplets infecting another person when a Covid-19 patient coughs or sneezes,” Ranjan said.
Ranjan, who is a computer science graduate from BIT-Mesra, added that as there has been no positive case of Covid-19 in the district, his team has developed only one cov-bot and isolation bed, but if the situation demands they can increase the production. Earlier, Ranjan had designed a telephone booth-size protective gear for health workers to collect samples for Covid-19 tests.