A Robot to Clean your Room? St Joseph's Health Centre Introduces New Bacteria-Killing Robot

The next time you touch the door handle of PB, push the buttons of the microwave, or grab on to the hand grip on the subway, think about how many people have touched it before you. Imagine the number of unknown and invisible organisms that you just collected and will soon inoculate into your eyes or nose. That seems scary to me, urging me to scrub my hands for the 12th time today! But isn’t the thought of staying in a hospital room where countless people have stayed for treatment of a plethora of diseases even scarier? As a patient,you essentially live, sleep, and eat in this room, while sitting on the same bed for the entirety of your hospital stay. You hope to recover while in the hospital and hopefully not be invaded with a bug that was lurking in your room from previous patients. For this reason, infection control and environmental services are so essential to both patient and staff safety.

The team at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto has just introduced a new member to their team, a fully empathetic robot called the Tru-D SmartUVC (also known as “Trudi”). Trudi enters the room after her human team members have manually cleaned it using current best practices. The robot has sensors that analyze the size and objects in the room to determine how much time it will take to thoroughly disinfect the space. After the analysis, everyone is to evacuate the room so that Trudi can use UVC light to disinfect. The dose of UVC light delivered kills bacteria and viruses, including culprits of common hospital-acquired infections such as influenza, norovirus, C. difficile, and MRSA. Trudi can deliver this UVC light to every inch of the room, including corners and underneath furniture and equipment. Currently at St. Joseph’s, Trudi is used to clean patient rooms, mobile work stations, patient tools, and patient transport devices (such as wheelchairs and walkers). Trudi’s work is intended to expand to the operating rooms too!

You may wonder how effective this recent technology is in reducing hospital-acquired infections. A study was done at nine hospitals in the southeastern United States by investigators at the Duke Infection Control Outreach Network earlier this year (the BETR-D study). They found that enhanced terminal disinfection using UVC, on top of traditional bleach- based cleaning, resulted in an over 30% reduction of infections from multidrug resistant organisms compared to traditional cleaning alone. With this impressive efficacy, perhaps we can expect to see more action from Trudi in other hospitals too. I eagerly await more technological advances in infection control such as this one.

References:

Anderson, D. J., Chen, L. F., Weber, D. J., Moehring, R. W., Lewis, S. S., Triplett, P. F., . . . Sexton, D. J. (2017). Enhanced terminal room disinfection and acquisition and infection caused by multidrug-resistant organisms and Clostridium difficile (the Benefits of Enhanced Terminal Room Disinfection study): a cluster-randomised, multicentre, crossover study. The Lancet, 389(10071), 805-814. doi:10.1016/s0140- 6736(16)31588-4
Bacteria-killing robot joins St. Joe’s cleaning team. (2017, September 22). Retrieved September 20, 2017, from http://hospitalnews.com/bacteriakilling- robot-joins-st-joes-cleaning-team/
Image: https://stjoestoronto.ca/2017/08/bacteria-killing-robot-joins-st-joes-cleaning-team/