Handwashing Action Detection System for an Autonomous Social Robot (preprint)

Young children are at an increased risk of contracting contagious diseases such as COVID-19 due to improper hand hygiene. An autonomous social agent that observes children while handwashing and encourages good hand washing practices could provide an opportunity for handwashing behavior to become a habit. In this article, we present a human action recognition system, which is part of the vision system of a social robot platform, to assist children in developing a correct handwashing technique. A modified convolution neural network (CNN) architecture with Channel Spatial Attention Bilinear Pooling (CSAB) frame, with a VGG-16 architecture as the backbone is trained and validated on an augmented dataset. The modified architecture generalizes well with an accuracy of 90% for the WHO-prescribed handwashing steps even in an unseen environment. Our findings indicate that the approach can recognize even subtle hand movements in the video and can be used for gesture detection and classification in social robotics.

Design and development of a low-cost powered air-purifying respirator for frontline medical workers for COVID-19 response

The coronavirus pandemic has affected millions of lives around the world. The availability of personal protective equipment at a low cost has been an important factor in determining the well-being of frontline health workers who are integral to the global response to COVID-19. This paper discusses the design and development of a low-cost open-source powered air-purifying respirator (PAPR) for medical professionals which costs approximately INR 10, 000. We detail the assembling process for this respirator using widely available components that allows for easy scale-up and replication in any country, thereby ensuring the safety of frontline health and sanitation workers who are at an elevated risk of contracting COVID-19. We worked with doctors at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences to test the prototype for airflow under varying battery life conditions and found it to provide 10 CFM airflow (1.7 times the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) airflow requirements) for over 7 hours without any long term effects due to noise from the actuators. © 2020 IEEE.