The Journal of Korea Robotics Society (로봇학회논문지)

Korea Robotics Society (한국로봇학회)
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Development of Multi-DoF Automatic Nasopharyngeal Swab Sampling Robot

다자유도 비강 자동 검체 채취 로봇 메커니즘 개발

  • Received : 2022.11.22
  • Accepted : 2023.01.15
  • Published : 2023.05.31
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Abstract

To control the spread of COVID-19, it is important to identify the infection in its incipient stages so that the infected persons can be dealt with accordingly. The currently used face to face sampling method may increase the risk of infection for medical professionals as it exposes them to the asymptomatic yet infectious patients. This can result in further increases in the load on the medical system and workload of the medical staff. As a solution to this problem, in this paper, we present a robotic system for rapid non-face-to-face automatic nasopharyngeal swab sample collection. The system consists of a custom designed 7-DoF manipulator equipped with a specially developed safety mechanism for restricting the maximum force applied by the tip of the swab. During the swab sampling process, the force applied by the tip of the swab is continuously monitored in real-time by a 3-axis force sensor in order to detect contact with the nasopharynx. The possibility of using this system for automaticnasopharyngeal swab sample collection is proven through experimentation with a phantom model.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported in part by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Institutional Program under Grant KIST 2E31561, and by the Korea Advanced Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (2020M3H8A1115027)

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