Abstract
There are high risks of infection for surgeons during the face-to-face COVID-19 swab sampling due to the novel coronavirus’s infectivity. To address this issue, we propose a flexible transoral robot with a teleoperated configuration for swab sampling. The robot comprises a flexible manipulator, an endoscope with a monitor, and a master device. A 3-prismatic-universal (3-PU) flexible parallel mechanism with 3 degrees of freedom (DOF) is used to realize the manipulator’s movements. The flexibility of the manipulator improves the safety of testees. Besides, the master device is similar to the manipulator in structure. It is easy to use for operators. Under the guidance of the vision from the endoscope, the surgeon can operate the master device to control the swab’s motion attached to the manipulator for sampling. In this paper, the robotic system, the workspace, and the operation procedure are described in detail. The tongue depressor, which is used to prevent the tongue’s interference during the sampling, is also tested. The accuracy of the manipulator under visual guidance is validated intuitively. Finally, the experiment on a human phantom is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the robot preliminarily.
Highlights
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) transmitted through respiratory droplets is spreading rapidly (Chaolin et al, 2020)
The deformation of the tongue is caused by the elastic of the polylactic acid (PLA) material
The block that drives the tongue depressor is restricted within the manipulator frame to ensure that the rotation of the tongue depressor ranges is in a defined region
Summary
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) transmitted through respiratory droplets is spreading rapidly (Chaolin et al, 2020). The widely used diagnose method is the oropharyngeal-swab (OP-swab) sampling (Chen et al, 2020). This sampling is suggested to be performed by a healthcare professional, while other possible approaches such as nasal mid-turbinate swab could be self-collection under supervised (Kim et al, 2020). The healthcare workers who perform swab sampling face high infection risks caused by the testees’ aerosol during the sampling, as close person to person contact is the main way for the transmission of the virus (Jin et al, 2020). As highlighted in (Yang et al, 2020), one of the effective solutions is using the teleoperated robot that can keep the operators safe by avoiding close contact with the testees (Navid et al, 2021; Xiao et al, 2021)
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