Scientists Consider Repurposing Robots for Ebola - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/science/scientists-consider-repurposing-robots-for-ebola.html
“As was the case in Fukushima, the Ebola crisis in Africa has revealed a significant gap between robot capabilities and what is needed in the realm of disaster relief and humanitarian assistance,” said Gill A. Pratt, a roboticist who is a program manager at the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “We have a moral obligation to try and select, adapt and apply available technology where it can help, but we must also appreciate the difficulty of the problem.”
Many of the countries experiencing the worst of the Ebola epidemic are in no position to deploy robots. But rudimentary models are widely used in medical settings in the United States, and already nervous hospital administrators are reaching out to manufacturers.