Hospitalized kids use robots in class

Achim, whose severe rash arose from a case of bacterial meningitis, said that when he was offered the use of Mr. Spike, "I was out of my mind, saying, `A robot?' When I first saw it, it looked difficult."

But he picked up all the moves in 30 minutes, he said, and now finds it "cool" rather than strange.

"It's like a video game but the only thing is you have to go to school," he said.

"When you're in the hospital you're isolated, you're stuck here," said Desimone. "You don't have friends, you don't have anything except maybe a phone call from home. You fall behind at school. With this you have social interaction, which is a part of school. Yeah, we could have a teacher come into his hospital room and teach him, but that's not the same."

Each of the robots has a disk-shaped head, with a 15-inch screen showing the remote feed and a smaller screen that shows what the other robot is displaying.

The rod connecting the head to the trunk looks enough like a neck that the one in the Blythedale classroom had an ID card looped around it. The "shoulders" can hold up a T-shirt. The trunk slopes outward toward the 3-foot-by-3-foot wheelbase so the robot can fit under tables and desks. The bright orange plastic hand emerges from the trunk with a low whirr.

The robots aren't protected in class or in the hospital, and there has been no abuse, Desimone said.

"The kids see it as another kid, so they wouldn't pound on it," he said.

Blythedale has its own school, but that's rare and irrelevant to the use of the robots, which use wired or wireless Internet connections.

"You can have a child hospitalized in New York City and his classroom can be in New Zealand," Summa said. "We can connect any two points around the world."

The robot system was developed in Toronto by Telbotics Inc. with Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. It is managed in the U.S. by The Learning Collaborative Inc., under a federal grant. The 40 robots now in use are on loan to the hospitals, although Summa said they are available for sale at about $70,000 a pair.

Summa said one student used a robot so fully that it joined the boy's classmates to sing a song at a school show. He said a child in the audience asked, "What's that thing up on stage?" to which a friend of the student replied, "That's no thing. That's Jimmy."

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