In China, Beijing-based robotics company Cloud 9 sent 14 medical bots to Wuhan to help care for Covid patients. Their humanoid service robot Ginger (a Pepper-style bot) helped with hospital admissions, while telling jokes. Patients responded well. Humans can get tired and snappy; robots won’t. At the end of a long day, patients were still greeted with enthusiasm – and the surprise factor seems to have cheered people up. We used to associate ‘virus’ with computers. Computer-programmed robots can’t catch human viruses. These bots will increasingly manage routine medical procedures, like
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