Robot helps disinfect wildlife rehab centre

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This article was published 28/08/2020 (1925 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre’s newest volunteer is boxy, dedicated to disinfecting and worth around $115,000 — oh, and it’s a robot.

Service robot company Solaris donated one of its Lytbots to the Iles des Chênes-based animal care centre. The Lytbot pulses UV rays to eliminate pathogens that can be life-threatening. The product is undergoing tests to see if it effectively removes COVID-19 from surfaces. A 2017 Western University study found that it eliminated a surrogate coronavirus, Solaris CEO Val Ramanand said.

Wildlife Haven’s bot is the first to be used in Canada, he said.

Ramanand has known Steve Loney, the president of the Wildlife Haven’s board of directors, for around 15 years. His company sponsored the non-profit’s gala in the spring of 2019, and they were looking for more ways to help the organization.

Solaris asked if the rehabilitation centre could use one of their robots — and the answer was a resounding yes, according to Zoé Nakata, the centre’s executive director.

Lytbots have been around for about three years, and now, over 200 hospitals in the United States are using them, Ramanand said. He’d planned to ship a Lytbot to Wildlife Haven in February, but there were production delays — and then the pandemic exploded through Canada and its southern neighbour.

“We’ve been backordered in equipment,” Ramanand said. “We can’t build them fast enough.”

The donation was put on hold as Ramanand shipped his product from Toronto to hospitals in the United States. They’re mainly used to disinfect operating rooms, Ramanand said.

Last week, Solaris had a spare Lytbot to send to Wildlife Haven. The orange, blue and cream machine has since been used to clean rooms that hold the centre’s animal patients.

When an animal leaves Wildlife Haven, its room is scrubbed with soap and water, then with a cleaning solution that may be bleach-based. The Lytbot is a third step: it’s rolled into the room and has its parameters set. The programmer leaves and pushes a button to start the machine, which is about 1.3 metres tall. A square “head” pops up from the Lytbot and pulses UV light outwards at 360 degrees. No humans or animals can be in the room when the bot is working.

Biosecurity is extremely important in the rehabilitation centre, Nakata said.

“If an animal were to catch a communicable disease at our centre, and then we release them back into nature, there’s risk of that disease being spread throughout the wildlife population,” she said, adding that it’s important to keep staff and volunteers safe too.

There’s another plus to the Lytbot — new revenue. Animals typically stay at the centre for two to four weeks; thus, the non-profit can rent out the robot when they’re not using it. Hospitals, schools, and private commercial companies could pay to have a team from Wildlife Haven come out with the Lytbot and disinfect their rooms, if all goes according to plan, Nakata said. Organizers are still determining what the service could look like.

“When it comes to fundraising, you have to be creative sometimes,” Nakata said. “Right now, with the global pandemic, people are really interested in those kinds of services.”

Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre doesn’t get government funding.

gabrielle.piche@freepress.mb.ca