Nucleic acid sampling robot, an emerging market worth hundreds of billions

The epidemic has profoundly changed our lives in the past few years. Even daily greetings have changed from "Have you eaten?" to "Have you taken nucleic acid?" There is no doubt that nucleic acid testing has become a part of our daily life.

However, the huge demand for nucleic acid testing has caused shortages of medical personnel and manpower in various places, which has even affected the normal operation of hospitals, resulting in cases where other patients cannot receive timely treatment from time to time. In addition, Long-term, high-intensity repeated sampling work is also a huge challenge to the mental and physical strength of the sampling personnel. Obviously, this state cannot be sustained for a long time.

So using unmanned, non-contact robots to replace manual sampling work has become a natural choice. It can not only reduce the risk of infection among medical staff, but also share repetitive and heavy labor. It can also alleviate the shortage of medical resources.

According to incomplete statistics, more than 10 domestic research institutes and companies have announced fully automatic nucleic acid sampling robot products, and some of them have completed multiple iterations. , reaching practical standards, which means that nucleic acid sampling robots are on the eve of large-scale application.

Nucleic acid sampling robot is a new type of robot application and is closely related to our life and health. Many people may wonder whether it is reliable and whether it can really be popularized in the future. Various issues are worth discussing.

How does the nucleic acid sampling robot work?

Generally speaking, the process of nucleic acid sampling can be divided into steps such as collection, collection, packaging, preservation, and sterilization. The same is true for robotic sampling. The more difficult part is sampling. The standard operation requires slowly extending the swab into the mouth, crossing the base of the tongue, wiping up and down the posterior pharyngeal wall, and wiping the tonsillar recesses or palatal arches back and forth at least three times to collect mucosal cells.

Judging from the nucleic acid sampling robots currently on trial, it takes about 30 seconds to complete a sampling, which is much slower than manual work. In the future, if large-scale popularization is to be implemented, the speed will inevitably be increased.

It is understood that if a robot wants to safely complete a sampling, there are two most important systems behind it, namely the vision system and the force control system. The former is positioned and the latter is executed.

On the vision system, the robot can deeply perceive the position of the human throat, the entire mouth, and the small tongue at the back through machine vision to determine the part where the swab should be wiped. The difficulty here is that different people and shooting angles display different oral conditions. For example, some people have swollen tonsils, and some people don’t even have tonsils. Robots need to accurately identify the adoption area. Some robot companies mobilize employees to carry out For photo sampling of the pharynx, more than 5,000 samples were collected for machine learning until the sampling area could be accurately identified.

In the force control system, in order to ensure the safety of the sampling process, a safe working range is set for adults and children. At the same time, the sampling force is generally controlled between 0.2 N and 0.4 N, 1 Newton. It is approximately equal to 100g, about the weight of two eggs, that is, the sampling force is about the weight of half an egg. This force will not hurt the fragile oral cavity, and the movement accuracy can also be controlled to 0.02mm. Both aspects can basically guarantee the sampling It's safe.

In fact, the two major systems at present - the machine vision system for recognizing images and the force control system for adjusting strength are already very mature, and their accuracy has long exceeded that of humans. Now they are just replaced by machine parts. The human throat is more fragile. Of course, although the technology is very mature, after all, the nucleic acid sampling robot directly contacts the human mouth, so it needs to continue to improve in human-computer interaction, detection accuracy, safety and other aspects.

There is a huge demand for nucleic acid sampling robots

In May of this year, the National Health Commission required the establishment of 15-minute walk nucleic acid sampling circles in big cities to carry out regular nucleic acid testing, and many cities subsequently announced follow-up. , the demand for relevant testing personnel has surged.

The State Council Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism pointed out at the meeting that the layout of sampling points should take into account the population, geographical transportation, and nucleic acid testing institutions. It can be referenced to set up one sampling point for every 2,000-3,000 people, and one sampling point for every 600-800 people. Set up a sampling station.

Referring to this data, there are currently about 550 million people in first- and second-tier cities. If calculated based on the standard of configuring one sampling point for 2,000 people, about 275,000 accounting sampling points are needed, and each sampling point is generally 3- Five sampling stations require at least 10 people, which means that 2.75 million nucleic acid workers are needed. If it is rolled out across the country in the future, more people will be needed, which shows the huge gap of professionals.

In addition, along with the huge demand for nucleic acid testing, there are also many problems, such as non-standard nucleic acid sampling operations, unreasonable testing distribution, long queues during peak periods, inconvenient testing for special groups, etc. Among them, the lack of professional personnel, The non-standard nucleic acid sampling operation is a problem that needs to be solved urgently, and the use of robots is one of the solutions.

The nucleic acid sampling robot can not only replace manual samplers to complete repeated sampling tasks, share the work pressure of medical staff, but also reduce the risk of cross-infection. Although it cannot be completely avoided, its 24-hour standby advantage can also disperse the flow of people. , to facilitate people to flexibly sample and avoid cross-infection to the greatest extent.

In the future, as technology further matures and sample data becomes more abundant, nucleic acid sampling robots will have higher efficiency and accuracy than manual sampling.

Some experts said that in order to improve detection efficiency and reduce human errors, it is urgent to improve the high-throughput quantification and automation of nucleic acid sampling robots. Although some products are currently on the market, they need to be popularized. In the future, nucleic acid sampling robots will have a very big impact. development prospects and market space.

What are the other difficulties?

Although the nucleic acid sampling robot seems to have a very promising future, as an emerging application, it is still in the early stages of development and inevitably has many problems that need to be solved.

The first is the issue of efficiency. Currently, the fastest nucleic acid sampling robot takes 30 seconds to detect one person, which is far inferior to skilled medical staff. Improving the sampling speed is an inevitable trend.

The second is the sampling accuracy. Although machine vision technology is now very mature, as long as there are enough samples, accurate positioning can be achieved. However, people are not fixed devices. The human body will shake, which greatly increases the difficulty of sampling. The current solution is to use a mouthpiece to limit the person's mouth to a smaller range. Not only is this a waste of resources, many people are unwilling to accept it.

Finally, there is also the problem of excessive cost. There are currently two types of nucleic acid sampling robots. One is to pursue speed and transform the original industrial robot on the assembly line into one that can be used in nucleic acid sampling scenarios. This seems to be overkill. ; The other is to produce nucleic acid robots customized with core components, which is cheaper in terms of price. But even so, some researchers said that the price of such a machine is about 1 million yuan, so the current price of nucleic acid sampling robots The buyers are mainly governments, and large-scale application still has a long way to go.

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