Nighttime patients at Johns Hopkins could see a robot moving in the busy hallways of the hospital?s emergency room.
The 6-foot-tall robot is the center of a new pilot program in which Spanish-language translator Juvenal Reyes operates the machine from his home laptop, moving the monitor that displays his face and navigating the robot from room to room.
“It feels very much like I am actually there,” Reyes said.
Reyes, who lives in Baltimore City, is on call from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. whenever the hospital staff needs help communicating with Spanish-speaking patients.
Sometimes patients are uncomfortable talking to a robot, but they usually overcome that discomfort once they make eye contact and converse with him, Reyes said
Alex Nason, director of telemedicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine, adapted the robot, which has been in use for about a month, to be used for translation.
“I always think of how technology can be used to overcome barriers, including distance, time, language and location,” he said.
“Having a good translator helps prevent mistakes and misunderstandings,” said Shannon Bechy, charge nurse at the hospital. “It?s so important to get the whole story, not just pieces of it.”
Reyes? biggest limitation is that the robot doesn?t have hands to press the elevator button when it must go from floor to floor, so he has to wait until someone can help him.
“They are working on a new generation of robot that has appendages,” he said.
