Robot Cleaners in Hospitals

Have you ever wondered how far things were going to get before we had robots doing everything for us? Well, now we are one step closer. The Xenex is a robot that is used in hospitals to help get rid of the unwanted and definitely unwelcome germs and bacteria. The website cited above details the problems in hospitals, the solution that they are administering with the Xenex, and information about the company itself. The site is very detailed so anyone can learn more about the robots that are making our hospitals better.

According to cnn.com, the Xenex is "a mobile, robotic device that combats germs with blasts of light. It looks like Star Wars' R2D2 with a handle, but it's a killing machine -- if you're a microorganism." I would love to have a personal R2D2. Who wouldn't? I'm imagining a massive Star Wars battle where R2D2 has a light saber. I'm not sure how exactly that would work, but I have a pretty big imagination. Okay, well, my friend Jake just reminded me that R2D2 uses a tazer so the little video in my head has now changed a bit. It's still pretty epic though. The site also says, "The Xenex disinfects a hospital room in about five to 10 minutes, focusing on high-touch surfaces like tray tables, telephones, and bedrails. After housekeepers finish cleaning a room, they wheel the machine in and hit go." How cool is that? I need something that will clean my house in that short amount of time.

At first I was wondering why we would really need a machine to clean a hospital considering they are usually considered the healthiest place for a sick person to be in the first place, but now I understand. They are actually probably the dirtiest places. The worst thing about hospitals is that they are full of HIAs. HIAs are hospital-acquired infections and are defined as "infections not present and without evidence of incubation at the time of admission to a healthcare setting". According to this site, the 3 major sites of healthcare-associated infections are pneumonia, bloodstream infections, and urinary tract infections. This means that there are a wide range of ways to get an HIA and that they are more common than one would think.

Robots are being built these days for a thousand and two reasons. It is almost as if we are trying to wipe out our own race with the robots we build. I like that we have robots to help us with the things that we could not do all on our own otherwise, but I also think that we need to be careful about what privileges we are taking away from our fellow man with the robots and other helpers that we are building. The automation of certain tasks in the workforce eliminates jobs which normal people could do. Even though the robot can do the job a lot faster, we the people of the plant need to have jobs which is what we have been grumping at the president to create.