Real-time contamination modeling for robotic health care support

Kory Kraft, Tiffany Chu, Patrick Hansen, William D. Smart

Abstract: Real-time contamination monitoring in health care facilities would allow medical teams to take appropriate actions to carefully enter, avoid, or decontaminate contaminated areas, reducing infection risk for themselves and their patients. In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate the first end-to-end, real-time contamination tracking system for robotic health care support. The system models contamination of the environment and people, directs decontamination efforts of a simulated scrubber robot, and alerts users when nearing contaminated areas. We outline our transmission model design choices, as based on Ebola virus disease, and evaluate the system against the spread of a physical substance.