Telerobotic Operation of ICU Ventilators

Submission to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2021 workshop on "Impact of COVID-19 on Medical Robotics and Wearables Research"
Authors:
Balazs P. Vagvolgyi (JHU), Mikhail Khrenov (UMD), Jonathan Cope (JHH), Anton Deguet (JHU), Peter Kazanzides (JHU), Sajid Manzoor (JHH), Russell H. Taylor (JHU) and Axel Krieger (JHU, UMD)
(JHU: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA; UMD: University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA; JHH: Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, MD, USA)
Abstract:
The novel coronavirus (SARC-CoV-2) has infected approximately 140 million people worldwide since December 2019 and claimed over 3 million human lives. The primary cause of severe symptoms is pneumonia that often requires patients to be placed on mechanical ventilation in intensive care units (ICU). Healthcare personnel may need to adjust ventilator settings several times an hour and each time they need to don and doff personal protective equipment (PPE) in order to enter a patient room, which strains PPE resources and significantly extends the time required to make adjustments. The problem could be alleviated by remotely controlling ventilators, however currently available ventilators do not have this capability. In this work, we describe the development of a teleoperated robotic system that enables the remote control of a ventilator from outside the patient room. The system comprises a simple Cartesian robot equipped with a stylus mounted on the touch screen of the ventilator and a remote controller software running on a tablet computer that controls the robot using wireless communication. Preliminary evaluation results show the potential for significant time and PPE savings by using the proposed robotic device with a common commercial ventilator.