研究人员制造了一种狗型机器人护士，可以远程测量病人的生命体征

Testing a patient for Covid-19 can be an unnerving experience for health care workers, but researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston are hoping to use robots to change that.

对一个病人进行Covid-19测试可能会让医护人员感到不安，但是来自麻省理工学院和波士顿布里格姆女子医院的研究人员希望用机器人来改变这种状况。

Operating robots with a handheld device, medical workers may soon be able to talk with patients about their symptoms while measuring vitals -- all from another room.

通过手持设备操作机器人，医务人员可能很快就能在测量生命体征的同时，与病人谈论他们的症状——所有这些都是在另一个房间里进行的。

The researchers have been using a robot on healthy volunteers and are making plans to use it to test people who show Covid-19 symptoms in a hospital setting, the university said in a news release.

该大学在一份新闻发布会上说，研究人员已经在健康志愿者身上使用了一个机器人，并计划用它来测试在医院出现Covid-19症状的人。

"In robotics, one of our goals is to use automation and robotic technology to remove people from dangerous jobs," MIT postdoc Huang said. "We thought it should be possible for us to use a robot to remove the health care worker from the risk of directly exposing themselves to the patient."

“在机器人技术领域，我们的目标之一是利用自动化和机器人技术让人们摆脱危险的工作，”麻省理工学院博士后黄先生说。“我们认为，我们应该有可能使用机器人来消除医护人员直接接触患者的风险。”

A tablet mounted to the "head" of Boston Dynamics' dog-like robot, allows communication with patients. The robot also is equipped with an infrared camera, along with three monochrome cameras that are capable of filtering different wavelengths of light.

波士顿动力公司的狗型机器人的“头部”上安装了一块平板电脑，可以与患者进行交流。这款机器人还配备了一个红外摄像头，以及三个能够过滤不同波长光的单色摄像头。

These four cameras can measure skin temperature, breathing rate, pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation from as far as 6 1/2 feet (2 meters) away.

这四个摄像头可以在6.5英尺(2米)远的地方测量皮肤温度、呼吸频率、脉搏和血氧饱和度。

"We didn't really develop new technology to do the measurements," Huang says. "What we did is integrate them together to analyze different vital signs at the same time."

“我们并没有真正开发新技术来进行测量，”黄说。“我们所做的是将它们整合在一起，同时分析不同的生命体征。”

The researchers expect to focus on triage applications in the short term, with the goal of ultimately deploying robots like this to patients' hospital rooms to continuously monitor them and let doctors to check in on them without ever having to step into the room.

研究人员希望在短期内把重点放在分诊应用上，最终的目标是将这样的机器人配置到病人的病房里，对病人进行持续的监控，并让医生在不需要进入病房的情况下进行检查。