By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
An ingenious way to minimize the spread of the Covid-19 spread among medical workers in Rwanda has been deployed.
At the Kanyinya COVID-19 treatment facility near the capital city, Kigali, three robots carry out the simple tasks like taking body temperatures and monitoring patients. Covid-19 is mostly spread to medical workers when doing this routine.
The robots which have human appearance were donated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to the country.
Rwanda so far has 355 confirmed cases of the Coronavirus, a disease that is currently prevalent in every country on earth.
“The three robots that we have are part of the treating team,’’ said David Turatsinze, a doctor at the 75-bed facility, which housed 65 patients when a team of Reuters journalists, visited.
By relaying messages to doctors and helping the team assess the effectiveness of their clinical decisions, the robots cut the number of bedside visits that doctors have to make.
Francine Umutesi, a bio-medical engineer who works as a health technology operations specialist at the Ministry of Health, said the robots were a first for Africa and had the potential to offer even more support to medical teams.
“It doesn’t remove the tasks the doctors are supposed to do, it’s just complementing their efforts,’’ she said.
Rwanda already uses drones to deliver blood and enforce restrictions designed to slow the spread of COVID-19.
There are two more robots at the country’s other COVID-19 treatment centre, Nyamata, in south east Kigali.
Officials said the robots will be programmed to carry out additional tasks.
“In the future if they are programmed to take even blood pressure and the (blood) sugar, that definitely would be so helpful,’’ said Turatsinze.