Development of an automated cleaning system for hospitals
Authors: Colin Griffin, Tamas Szecsi
Abstract
In recent years so-called hospital superbugs; bacteria which are resistant to antibiotics, have become a major issue in medical facilities across the country. This bacteria can cause serious illness, and in some cases death in patients. In 2007 alone 432 cases of the MRSA bug were officially reported between the months of January and September, showing the extent of the problem. The Health Service Executive (HSE) has pledged to spend close to €171million this year on cleaning in Irish hospitals following an independent survey published late last year which found that not one hospital of the 51 surveyed nationally had a rating of “very good” hygiene.
As hygiene is becoming an ever more important issue there is a need for a cheap, simple automated cleaning system that could be installed in hospitals to tackle the growing problem. To achieve this goal an existing cleaning robot, the iRobot Roomba, was used as the platform to build upon. This paper documents the work carried out thus far on the cleaning system which involves testing the capabilities of the Roomba vacuum & development of software in both a Windows and Linux environment.
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Dear authors and all other conference participants,
Welcome to the robotics session of this IPROMS 2008 conference.
My name is Ze Ji, and I am the co-chair of this session.
If you need any assist regarding this session, please feel free to contact me via email: JiZ1 (at) cf.ac.uk.
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You are very welcome to post questions after reading the papers, and I believe the authors will be there very happy to answer you.
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Kind regards,
Ze Ji
Robotics Session Co-Chair
IPROMS 2008
Dear authors,
I have some questions about your work.
First of all, what is main difference or merit bwteen ordinary robot vaccum clear and yours? I think MRSA is not olny matter of cleaning floor in a hospital. In my opinion, it should be included some special function to kill MRSA bug like antibiotics inside vaccum clear. If it can't kill the bug inside it, it would spread the bug more.
Secondly, I think inside of a hospital is strongly restricted electric sinals because they could cause of failure(or malfunction) of important medical machine or they could be harmful to patients' health.
Then, how could you communicate between PC and Roombas?
Best regards,
firstly thank you for your interest, your comments are very much appreciated.
presently there is very little difference between the roomba and a normal vacuum. the initial aim of this research is to prove the concept and show that the system is able to operate correctly. the vacuum is only capable of collecting dry materials and dust, much like a household vacuum. however a similar robot, named a Scooba (produced by iRobot) is designed to clean liquids and would be much more suitable for a hospital. once the concept has been proven to work the Roomba could be quickly and easily replaced with the Scooba since they operate in the the same manner with same software. Also to address the MRSA problem, disinfectants could be combined with the water cleaning system in the Scooba to provide a much more thorough clean and would work towards destroying any bacteria found in the cleaning cycle.
secondly; there are no signals sent from PC to Roomba in the finished system (apologies if this wasn't correctly explained in the report). initial testing was carried out using a PC because no other system was available at the time. to allow mobility of the Roomba Bluetooth communication was used. in the finished version there will be a small computer, such as a Gumstix, mounted on the Roomba. this will commpunicate through a serial cable, hence no wireless signals. although untested so far, it is not expected that the signals from the Cricket device would interfere with any medical equipmemt, however the RFid has that potential and as a result the cricket seems a more likely choice. minimal communication is required between the base robot and roomba vacuum. ideally no wireless communication would occur and, for example, 3 lights on the base robot would issue the instructions to the roomba vision system (i.e. 3 lights, in combination of binary sequence could issue 7 or 8 commands). unfortunately this concern has not yet been addressed in the project and i am grateful for you for bringing it to my attention.
again thank you for your time
regards
Welcome to "Intelligent Automation Systems" Session.
I am Ji Young Lee who is a co-chair for this session.
First of all, I thank authors to contribute their papers.
In addition, I welcome all visitors to this session.
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email: LeeJ5@cardiff.ac.uk.
Enjoy the session!
Kind regards,
Ji Young Lee
Intelligent Automation Systems Session Co-Chair
IPROMS 2008