Redesigning the microbiology laboratory workspace
10 week project in collaboration with ABB and the Umeå Clinical Microbiology Laboratory
Teaming up with Daan Hekking
For many patients, getting delayed lab results may lead to disaster.
In microbiology laboratories, these delays are sometimes due to human factors.
Wait... What do they do in a medical microbiology laboratory?
The purpose of medical microbiology is to identify bacterias and viruses and prescribe the suitable treatment for the patients. Medical microbiologists often serve as consultants for physicians, providing identification of pathogens and suggesting treatment options. The workflow for bacterial identification goes as follows:
Registration
Samples come in from the hospital or different parts of the region and they are labelled and prepared for analysis.
Inoculation
The sample is diluted and spread on an agar plate, which contains “food” for the bacteria to grow.
Incubation
The plates are stored in different environments for a period of time so bacteria can grow.
identification
Grown bacteria is identified using, for example, MALDI-TOF technique.
Susceptibility Testing
Several antibiotics are tested on the bacteria to identify which one is more effective.
What creates delays in Time-to-results?
Half of lab tasks are tedious
Tasks such as inoculation, susceptibility testing, preparing and sample transfering represent 49% of microbiologists time. These are seen as extremely repetitive tasks which microbiologist prefer not to do.
Human factors threat sample quality
Microbiologists prioritize quality control. Long exposure to wrong environments can worsen sample quality and slow down bacterial growth. Besides environmental impact, microbiologists work on a small scale and are in need of precise and sensitive instruments.
Plate reading delays results
Manual sample checking for bacteral growth is being done once a day, which takes in total up to 25% of microbiologists time. Fully automated systems allow constant sample monitoring, by using HD cameras, but can take up to 2 hours to deliver a sample.
Expensive full automation
Every clinical microbiology laboratory is different. Based on geographical location, the sample productivity varies per lab. Secondly, most of the laboratories are part of a hospital and therefore constrained in space, making full automation unimaginable.
How might collaborative robotics improve the efficiency of microbiology laboratories while maintaining work ethics?
Colab
The modular workstation to enhance microbiologists superpowers.
Colab is a workstation for clinical microbiologists that reduces the amount of repetitive tasks and improves the overall quality during inoculation. Colab also gives a better insight in bacterial growth during the incubation phase with the help of AI. The Time-to-result (TTR) will be reduced and the overall quality of the samble will be improved, which not only benefits the patient due to quicker diagnosis, it also allows the microbiologists to focus on the tasks the love to do within their field.
Reducing repetition
Like a ping pong table, microbiologists assign individual tasks to the robot arms and they send the task back once they are done inoculating the plates. This human-robot collaboration speeds up the inoculation process up to 50% and lets the microbiologists focus on more analytical tasks.
An optimized inoculation set-up
The desktop space has been designed to enable the microbiologist to customize the inoculation for each patient. The microbiologist has access to labelling tools, storage for accessories and a patient task tray to hand out the task over to Zack and Sarah. Once the task has been executed, the agar plates will be placed on the conveyor belt to be delivered to the incubator area.
Colab is a potential tool for all laboratory departments
The two collaborative robots can be deployed at any laboratory environments such as anaerobic chambers, sample registration and bacterial identification.
The two partners in crime
Zack & Sarah have a friendly character, move on a rail and have six degrees of axial movement. This creates a flawless, smooth and elegant movement of the robots. Zack and Sarah can pick up agar dishes, drip blood on the agar dishes and microscopic plates, inoculate (the process of spreading and streaking a liquid on the agar dish) and transport them to the incubation area. This duo is designed in such a way it invites you to work together with them effectively side by side, rather than in the background.
Outstanding versatility
The robot enables the microbiologist to adapt the functionality by easily switching tools. For example, Inoculation and incubation require a suction pad and an inoculation loop whereas in MALDI-TOF a pipette is needed.
Agile and trustworthy
With six degrees of freedom and a ball head, the robot arms move as natural as a human. Unnatural movements result in distraction, something that decreases trust and interrupts microbiologists’ workflow.
Incubation that improves time-efficiency
Once an agar dish is inoculated, it’s transported to one of the three incubation areas. The function of an incubator is to offer a specific environment in which a bacteria or fungi can grow as quickly as possible. A microbiologist will be notified once there is enough bacterial growth. If there is not enough growth, the agar plate will be discarded and removed from the incubator.
“We check the plates every morning, on Mondays
it can take up to the whole day to check only the urine plates for growth
”
An AI that reads plates like an expert
A high definition camera shoots photos on all samples on set intervals in order to identify bacterial growth by analyzing shape, size and growth patterns. Once there is significant growth, the right department will be notified to collect the sample.
Reorganized plate collection
Once the system has identified sustainable bacterial growth, it sorts the sample in a specific cartridge, ready to be picked up. These cartridges are organized by type and team, optimizing workflow.
Behind the scenes.
Our 10 weeks project was filled with hands-on work rather than spending endless hours on the screen. To make an impact we decided to keep a very close collaboration with Umeå Clinical Microbiology Laboratory to understand needs and validate decisions, review concepts.
Evaluating the needs collaborately
Understanding what an expert in such field needs a deep user research and many weeks of close collaboration. With the use of LEGO blocks and sacrificial concepts we generated deep discussions with experts on how do they work. During this phase, we learned about the lack of human touch that current solutions have: On one hand, microbiologists love the analytical tasks that require collaborative discussions and decision-making. On the other hand, they dislike Agar plate-reading and incoluation, because it is extremely monotonous.
“I love being in my own world, spending time with my little bacteria while listening to music on my headphones”
Role-playing as an ideation tool
Trying to build a robot without precisely understanding what tasks needs to perform may lead to failure. We decided to take a hands-on approach and we used role-playing as a way to ideate where things should be placed, how the microbiologist works together with the robot, and what kind of grip tools does the robot need to perform as intended. Role-playing such experiences made us evaluate the distribution of tasks between the robot and the human, helping us see wheter the flows would still maintain high work ethics.
Defining the robot’s expression and character
There is a basic difference between an industrial robot and a collaborative one: Predictability and safety. Industrial robots usually work in closed environments to prevent any accidents, as humans working around it have no way to know that the robot will do next. To tackle such issue, we decided have retractile grippers that fold when they are not being used, so the microbiologist would not feel threatened when interacting whithin the robot’s area. In addition, the robot would communicate its status through a frontal screen, making the worker continiously aware of what is the robot doing.
Experiencing degrees of freedom
Another aspect to build trust towards the robot is how is the movement percieved by the human. We explored several arm architectures to see how the robot moves in front of a human. We learned that having six degrees of axial movement, gives a more calming, slow and controlled movement, more similar to what a human would do.
