Robots could soon be infiltrating urban sewage systems to identify potential outbreaks of disease before they happen, according to architect and MIT professor Carlo Ratti (+ interview).
Ratti's team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a prototype robot called Luigi, which is able to collect samples from city sewers, as part of a project called Underworlds.
According to Ratti, these samples could be used create a map of human health from biological data that would help scientists predict outbreaks of disease and possibly prevent them.
"We could be looking at epidemics before they happen," said Ratti. "So we're able to see the influenza virus before people have influenza."
Carlo Ratti is the director of MIT's Senseable City Lab, which investigates and anticipates how digital technologies are changing the way people live at an urban scale. Portrait by Lars Kruger The ongoing Underworlds project, which includes a team of MIT biologists and researchers, aims to prove that cities can make use of their waste water systems.
"We're collecting this information and we're using it to understand the micro-biome of the city," Ratti told Dezeen. "The applications of this are diverse."
The tube-shaped Luigi robot contains filters and can be guided via an iPhone app to collect samples from key points in a city's waste system, and is currently being used for pilot studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Boston. The filters ...