By Irene Gaitirira
Published October 17, 2019
A robot mounted to the wall above a handwashing station at a primary school with pupils aged between five and 10 has helped in boosting the rate of handwashing.
Hand-washing is one of the most effective defence against the spread of diarrhoea and respiratory infections which cause the death of 1 300 young children die each day around the world according to figures from WaterAid India and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
To prevent this unnecessary death, scientists at University of Glasgow in Scotland and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University in India have invented a robot which encourages children to wash their hands more effectively and more consistently.
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According to University of Glasgow, the hand-shaped robot, dubbed ‘Pepe’, helps in boosting the rate of handwashing by 40%.
Just how did this work out?
“Pepe was mounted to the wall above a handwashing station at the Wayanad Government Primary School in Kerala, which has around 100 pupils aged between five and 10. A small video screen mounted behind Pepe’s green plastic exterior acted as a ‘mouth’, allowing researchers to tele-operate the robot to speak to the pupils and draw their attention to a poster outlining the steps of effective handwashing. A set of moving ‘eyes’ helped bolster the illusion that Pepe was paying attention to the children’s actions,” the scientists say in a statement.
They say “Pupils spent on average twice as long washing their hands after Pepe’s arrival. After the intervention, more than 95% of the students could correctly determine when handwashing with soap has to be done – before a meal and after a visit to the toilet,” University of Glasgow says in a statement to the media.
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The outcomes from the research project that was carried out at a public primary school in Kerala region of India were presented on Global Handwashing Day on October 15 at the 28TH IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication in New Delhi in India.
Amol Deshmukh from the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science who led the project in partnership with colleagues from Amrita University, says, “We chose this particular primary school for our research because the pupils are drawn from scheduled castes and tribes, a segment of the Indian population which is most affected by poor sanitation and hygiene. We believe this is the first social robotics study to try to improve the lives of children like this.”
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Saying “Social robots could potentially create a positive impact’, Dr Deshmukh laments “they have rarely been tested with people from rural backgrounds in developing countries.”
“In the future,” Dr Deshmukh says “the research will focus on developing autonomous technology for the social robot, so it is capable of interacting with children without any input from humans.”
This is the second ‘social robot’ research project conducted by the University of Glasgow and Amrita University. In 2018, they introduced a four wheeled robot to help residents of Ayyampathy in southern India carry 20-litre bottles of water from the local well to their homes.
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