The United National Development Programme (UNDP) has donated three Ohmni Robots to the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases to help protect frontline doctors and nurses from Covid-19 and other infectious diseases.

Ohmni Robots are tested at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases. (Photo courtesy of UNDP)

Ohmni Robots have the main function of remote communication, remote diagnoses and treatment.

Handing over the robots to the Hospital on June 25, UNDP Resident Representative in Vietnam Caitlin Wiesen said these robots provide safe interface between the doctor and the patient for diagnoses and they enable doctors to see far more patients at a time. They are fully automatic and can be managed from a large distance and provided the added function of tele-medicine and tele-training, that will be very important for the interface between the National Hospital and hospitals in rural areas.

She added that the intention was not to replace existing doctors and nurses, it was to complement and to provide safety in highly infectious context.

Nguyen Vu Trung, Deputy Director General of the Hospital, said so far, the hospital only has PPE and tries its best to protect doctors and nurses. However there are still people who are at high risks because of their direct contacts with patients, especially when they do some procedures for care and treatment.

“These robots will help us a lot, the non-contact procedures will protect us,” he said.

This is the first in series of robots to be delivered from UNDP to hospitals for testing ecosystem and robotic applications: diagnosis, tele-training, autonomous delivery of supplies for Covid-19 and other infectious diseases.

The second Robot, BeetleBot, will be delivered in July.

According to UNDP, after the test of the two types of robots, it will organise dialogues among different robots makers, as well as among the hospitals, healthcare system stakeholders and robot makers, thus building a healthy robotic ecosystem in Vietnam.

Source: VNA