The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has awarded $1.5 million over three years to the University of Illinois at Chicago and Worcester Polytechnic Institute to fund projects aimed at reducing workers’ exposures to hazards through the development and use of collaborative robots, or co-robots.

CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund studies of co-robots in the workplace through NSF’s National Robotics Initiative 2.0. The Initiative supports research in the U.S. that will accelerate the development and use of co-robots, an emerging robotic technology that complements, not replaces, human workers. Co-robots work alongside people or other robots and can help improve worker safety.

“The future of work includes a workplace where robots work in tandem with, or are even worn by, human workers,” said NIOSH Director John Howard, M.D. “This important research will help guide the development and use of co-robots that can help minimize health and safety risks to workers.”

In healthcare, remote-controlled nursing robots have the potential to reduce workload and the risk of infection, especially in quarantine and intensive care environments. Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute will develop a more intuitive interface to make it easier for nurses to operate robots from a distance. Researchers also will investigate best practices for integrating robots into current nursing education.

In manufacturing, lifting heavy objects can lead to costly and disabling work-related musculoskeletal disorders. Wearable robots, which provide mechanical assistance to the user’s joints, have the potential to reduce injuries from heavy lifting. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago will develop and investigate the effectiveness of a personalized wearable robot worn on the lower body that senses the wearer’s physical effort and responds accordingly using soft-wearable electronics.

Through its Center for Occupational Robotics Research, NIOSH is proactively working across industrial sectors to guide the development and use of occupational robots that enhance workers’ safety, health, and well-being. The Center’s research looks at traditional industrial robots that work in robotic cells and cages away from human workers as well as at emerging robotic technologies such as co-robots; wearable robotics or powered exoskeletons; remotely controlled or autonomous vehicles and drones; and future robots that increasingly use advanced artificial intelligence.

NIOSH is the federal institute that conducts research and makes recommendations for preventing work-related injuries, illnesses and deaths.

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With the Ebola threat still looming large, widespread efforts are being made to identify, quarantine and treat possible carriers. BigMosaic, a big data analytics program developed by the Centers for Disease Control in collaboration with Healthmap will aid CDC in monitoring new cases and work with the West African expat community.

Marty Cetron, director of CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, explained at a public discussion on Tuesday – “We have the near real-time availability of the global air transportation network, and we’re able to identify, and in a sense target, the risk populations, the diaspora populations from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, where they’re distributed down from the county-and-below levels, so we have a mosaic map of the U.S., and in some cases with other countries’ data.”

CDC, HealthMap, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Toronto-based BlueDot (formerly, BioDiaspora), worked together to see this app to completion. Utilizing census, demographic and migration health data of expat populations in the U.S. from 105 countries of birth, it can track the spread of infectious diseases globally, while also breaking down the population by education level, household income, and English speaking ability, reports MedCity News.

BioDiaspora had developed, an online tool charting spread of infectious diseases through international travellers. BioMosaic, using BioDiaspora, maps census data, migration patterns and health status identifies countries where international travel may give rise to emerging disease.

“CDC layers many data sets atop one another to create this mosaic map of the diaspora population both on the move and statically in terms of the resident population,” Cetron points out. “There are a number of big data sets that we access and aggregate, the common feature is that all of them are geo-coded,” Cetron said.

“So we bring in weather data, climate data, we bring in global distribution of poultry, we bring in distribution of swine populations, vector disease incidents from [the World Health Organization] and other sets, and pull all these things together and then put them in a way that they can be easily visualized or queried.”

Health kits with thermometers and mobile phones were distributed by CDC at airports that also debriefed on marking symptoms and instructions for the use of the kit. An estimated 100 mobile phones would allow CDC to exchange information with the users for a month.

Asked about the calls the CDC has handled for the program, Cetron said people queried about a fever but it turned out to be unrelated to Ebola. It has also helped direct people to local health facilities.

He further added in an Q&A with Peter Beinart of The Atlantic- “Epidemics of disease are frequently followed by epidemics of fear … and stigma. The epidemic of fear is understandable given the nature of this disease. But we need to make sure we get the balance right when we speak to the media…The disease needs to be controlled at the source.”

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