Kids don’t wash their hands. As much as we beg them to do it, they just don’t see the point. The problem is there’s no immediate consequence we can point to. For example, we can tell a child if they don’t finish their dinner they’ll go to bed hungry, and they’ll soon find out how true that is. But convincing kids that washing their hands will prevent major health hazards – particularly hazards they don’t understand — is a different story.
We know handwashing is vital to preventing the spread of disease. Bacteria and viruses are transmitted to our hands in a myriad of ways, such as when we come into contact with a toilet, when we shake hands, when we sneeze into our palm, or change a child’s diaper. And FYI — according to the Global Handwashing Partnership (GHP), a single gram of human feces can contain 10 million viruses and one million bacteria.
That’s not just gross, it’s potentially deadly. Diarrhea and respiratory infections can be easily passed from one person to another via the hands, and those two illnesses combined cause more than 20% of deaths of children under five years old. Diarrhea is, in fact, one of the major killers of children around the world, causing about 525,000 deaths annually.
Researchers at the University of Glasgow and the Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University in India have dreamed up a new way to encourage children to wash their hands. It comes in the form of a robot named Pepe. Shaped like a hand, Pepe the robot talks to you and his eyes even move around, giving the impression he’s watching to see whether you’re going to wash or not.
Pepe the handwashing robot got a trial run in Kerala, India, an area particularly affected by poor sanitary conditions and bad hygiene. The robot was mounted above a handwashing station at the Wayanad Government Primary School, which has about 100 students under the age of 10. When the pupils walked by the station, Pepe spoke to them and pointed out a nearby poster that instructs children on how to wash their hands effectively.
So, how did Pepe do? According to the researchers, quite well. The rate of handwashing at the Wayanad school increased by 40%. On average, the students washed their hands twice as long as they did before Pepe came to town. Not bad for a talking hand.
“We were delighted by the success of Pepe’s visit to this primary school,” Dr. Amol Deshmukh from the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science told TechXplore. Deshmukh led the project. “None of the children had ever interacted with anything like a robot before, but they were excited to interact with this relatively simple machine, which clearly had a positive effect on their efforts to keep their hands clean.”
Currently, Pepe is teleoperated by the researchers, but Deshmukh says future studies will focus on creating a robot that will be able to interact with children without input from humans.
“We’re keen to begin to carry out wide-scale deployments in rural schools to measure effectiveness of this type of social robotics,” Deshmukh said.
The researchers also provided the Wayanad students with a questionnaire to complete after they interacted with Pepe. The kids were asked if they liked the robot, and more than 90% responded yes. Not only that, but they hoped to see Pepe again after their school vacation.