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KIST Participates in Arab Health 2024 (January 29, 2024)
- Date : 2024-04-03
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KIST Participates in Arab Health 2024
The KIST Center for Development of Quarantine Robot Systems took part in Arab Health 2024, which was held at the Dubai World Trade Centre in the United Arab Emirates from January 29 to February 1, 2024. Arab Health is one of the world's largest healthcare expos, with 3,450 companies from 180 countries participating in 2024.
Supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT (Minister: Jong-Ho Lee) Innovation Challenge Pilot Project (July 2020 - June 2024; total research budget: 18.1 billion KRW), the KIST Center for Development of Quarantine Robot Systems aims to utilize robot-ICT convergence research to reduce the burden and risks faced by medical staff resulting from the current quarantine-oriented medical system by establishing a continuous, efficient new robot-based contactless quarantine system and standardizing the K-Quarantine system globally. 12 institutes, including KIST, the Korea Institute of Robotics & Technology Convergence (KIRO; President: Jun-Ku Yuh), and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST; President: Kwang-hyung Lee) have taken part in the project since its launch in 2020.
At the Arab Health 2024 expo, the KIST Center for Development of Quarantine Robot Systems showcased five public health management and infectious disease prevention robot technologies that are ready for use at residential treatment facilities, sites requiring daily disinfection, and intensive care sites.
Dr. Bum-Jae You from KIST presented the “Intelligent Goods Transport and Delivery Robot System,” which can be used at residential treatment facilities. This system provides a contactless last-mile delivery service that distributes meals and daily necessities to quarantined patients in residential treatment centers safely, significantly reducing infection anxiety and workloads for medical staff and assistants.
Dr. Gu-Bong Jung from KIRO introduced an “Intelligent Autonomous Disinfection Robot System for Multi-Use Facilities and Living Spaces” that can be used at sites requiring daily disinfection. The disinfection robot system can quickly and effectively perform disinfection tasks by wiping down the surfaces of objects with disinfectant and performing up-close UVC scans, reducing the time and labor burden on hospital personnel manually disinfecting areas by more than 50%.
In the field of intensive care site technologies, KIST's Dr. Jong-Won Lee presented the “Fundamentally Safe and Rapid Contactless Automatic Nasal Swab Sample Robot System,” KAIST Professor In-So Kweon showed the “Intelligent Contact Tracing/List-Making Technology for Confirmed Cases,” and KIST's Dr. Dong-Hyun Hwang exhibited the “Remote Monitoring and Operation System for Isolation Intensive Care Unit Treatment Equipment.”
The pandemic shed light on how many medical personnel are exposed to risks while confirming patient infections. The “Fundamentally Safe and Rapid Contactless Nasal Swab Automatic Sample Robot System,” which automatically collects samples from the nasal cavity and seals them, can reduce the infection burden on medical staff and double sample collection capacity in intensive care settings.
The “Intelligent Contact Tracing/List-Making Technology” uses self-developed multimodal intelligent CCTV, multiple sensors, and AI-based route tracing technology to achieve strong tracking performance, even in hospitals or public places with more than 10,000 daily visitors. According to Professor Ho-Young Lee from Bundang Seoul National University Hospital, this technology can solve the problem of potential medical personnel shortages during pandemics, and final verification for adoption is currently underway.
The “Remote Monitoring and Operation System for Isolation Intensive Care Unit Treatment Equipment” allows medical staff to intuitively monitor and operate artificial respirators and other equipment from outside of the intensive care unit. This technology recently succeeded in carrying out remote communication between Seoul and Gangneung, and is expected to become a core technology for Tele-ICUs (remote intensive care units) in smart hospitals in the future.
Dr. Sang-Rok Oh, who served as Director of the KIST Center for Development of Quarantine Robot Systems at the time, stated, “We are proud to showcase our division's achievements at Arab Health 2024,” adding, “Since the technologies our division has developed have already been tested and validated in hospital settings, that means we now have effective solutions for pandemic situations, which could occur at any time.” Moreover, he said, “We are simultaneously pushing for the global standardization of our technologies, while also aiming to build global partnerships through the Arab Health expo that enable us to directly apply some of these technologies toward hospital digitization, which is a growing global trend.”