Six-year-old Mexican startup Roomie designed a robot (Also known as RoomieBot) that runs on Intel technologies that help and assist medical staff at COVID-19 hospitals. RoomieBot makes decisions, such as which doctor to direct a patient to, and is also used by medical staff to interact with high-risk COVID-19 patients. Hospitals also turned to RoomieBot for a heartbreaking yet welcome use case of technology: to provide live, bedside video calls between terminally ill patients and their families so loved ones could say a final farewell.

Originally Roomie startup designed this robot to assist guests in hotels and restaurants, but due to the ongoing pandemic team Roomie wanted to help Mexico’s medical workers. In just four weeks, Roomie’s engineers adapted the robot to function in a hospital environment — they added vital sensors, including an oximeter (a device that estimates oxygen saturation levels of the blood), and made other improvements, such as coating the robot’s outer skin and an LCD panel with an antibacterial shield.

RoomieBot runs on Intel-based technology, including artificial intelligence algorithms that run on the Intel Movidius Vision Processing Unit (VPU), 8th Gen Intel NUCs and Intel RealSense cameras. The robot collects patient real-time data, which is streamed securely to Amazon Web Services, thus available to authorized medical staff.

“The greatest value that Intel technology has generated for us is the radical reduction of the time to market of our robots, from the development stage to commercialization. We previously developed 100% of the technological stack of our robots internally in Roomie, but we’re currently using Intel’s out-of-the-box hardware and software capabilities such as RealSense, NUC, and OpenVINO technology,” said Aldo Luévano, Roomie co-founder and CEO