A Chinese company claims to have developed a robot capable of performing Covid-19 tests with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
The robot, which debuted at the 2022 World Robot Conference in Beijing on Thursday, looks like a sales device and provides accurate polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests that require a lab.
The robot, developed by Chinese company BioTeke, can produce effects for up to 80 users in 45 minutes, much faster than classic methods. It can process samples from up to 320 people at a time.
There are other Covid-19 test robots on the market, but most of them concentrate on the sampling process, with robots replacing on-site staff to take oral swab samples. The samples are then sent to a lab for analysis, and taken from users. more than 12 hours to get your results.
“This new robot offers an option because it performs tests independently,” a BioTeke engineer nicknamed Meng said in an interview Monday.
The robot has other modules for sampling, extraction, purification, amplification, detection and search of results, all connected like the rows of a vending machine.
The sampling module evolved through BioTeke in cooperation with a think tank of the Artificial Intelligence Institute of Tsinghua University.
“The researchers built models of human mouths and developed a set of symbol popularity rules for a high-precision mechanical arm. The arm should move autonomously and gently collect oral swab samples from a user’s throat,” Meng said.
After sampling, the nucleic acid of the pattern requires purification and amplification to give a result. For this, the robot mimics the laboratory process, with a mechanical arm passing through the pattern tubes. When the tube reaches the research module, the result is that the waste is recorded and disposed of.
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Meng said the robot’s modular design makes it less difficult to repair and parts and fill the reagents used for the test.
The robot is also competitive in terms of cost. “This lowers the prices of hard work and sample shipping, and there is a mature market for reagent packages,” Meng said.
BioTeke is a government cooperation to generalize the use of robots, as the testing effects of Covid-19 are connected to sensitive private data, such as ID cards and phone numbers.
“We have licenses for some of the internal modules and the robot is being verified through the National Medical Products Administration,” Meng said.
Robots can be especially useful at airports, exercise stations, and community entrances that require instant Covid-19 verification results.
“At this stage, the Save Youion Epidemic paintings basically focus on mass detection of the population. The robot can serve as an immediate and affordable testing method. We can recognize positive carriers before they start spreading the virus in the city to save you from spreading the outbreak,” Meng said.
Once deployed on a large scale, the robot will particularly ease the pressure on doctors in China, who have been beaten through the covid-19 testing regime, he added.
This article was first published in the South China Morning Post.