T7AMR Robotic Floor Scrubber

Cleanliness has always been essential in healthcare, but today, the confluence of rising risks, rising expectations and rising standards make the cleanliness of spaces and surfaces more critical than ever for healthcare organisations.

Designed to be intuitive and easy to operate, the T7AMR delivers a solution that addresses labour challenges, drives efficiencies, and maintains a high standard of clean every time. As healthcare organisations recognise and adjust to heightened cleaning demands, they are encountering tough operational challenges:

Higher Cleaning Demands: Successfully mitigating rising infection risks — and meeting rising patient expectations for cleanliness — requires more frequent, more intensive and more complex facility cleaning measures.

Rising Labour Challenges: Labour is always a major operational cost. But today, many hospitals and clinics are facing both rising labour costs and a shortage of qualified, experienced and reliable talent to fill out their cleaning teams. Additionally, as cleaning standards increase, more labour may be necessary.

Overextended Cleaning Teams: With cleaning demands rising faster than cleaning resources, cleaning teams may find themselves overburdened and forced to make tradeoffs between the quantity and quality of their work.

Absenteeism and Turnover: A common outcome of overextended cleaning teams is falling job satisfaction that can increase rates of absenteeism and turnover — leading to further staff shortages.

What is an Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR)?

The biggest driver of increasing robotics adoption in facility cleaning is the shift to autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).

Compared to previous generation autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) — widely used in industrial applications such as manufacturing lines — AMRs are not limited by physical tracks or magnetic beacons.

This new breed of robots possesses sophisticated on-board artificial intelligence (AI) systems that enable AMRs to not only follow complex processes and make intelligent decisions about how to proceed on a task, but also to safely navigate dynamic indoor spaces, including working around patients and staff in the hallways and common areas of hospitals and clinics.

In most cases, robotic floor scrubbers are the same, or very similar, to the core cleaning machines already used by many healthcare organisations — fitted with an array of sensors and the on-board AI “brain” interface. This significantly simplifies adoption, as cleaning teams are typically already very familiar with the cleaning machines themselves. The T7AMR’s key features:

• Requires no custom infrastructure setup and adopts a simple, flexible ‘Teach & Repeat’ methodology.
• State-of-the-art technology: multiple sensors and LIDARs capture real time mapping and cleaning of the space being cleaned.
• Custom reporting delivers proof of performance by highlighting overall consistency of clean, identifies missed areas, and length of time to clean areas.
• Reduce risk of accidents with automatic braking and parking brake actuation.
• Get optimal water recovery, even in tight turns, to minimise the risk of slip-and-fall injuries.
   

'Co-Bots': Robots Supporting — Not Replacing — Existing Staff

Robotic cleaning machines directly address the supply-demand imbalance presented by rising cleaning demands and limited labor resources. But robots aren’t replacing cleaning staff. They’re working alongside human employees to make cleaning teams more efficient. These “co-bots” are freeing human employees to focus on more complex, strategic cleaning initiatives.

Supporting Faster Room Turns: One of the major metrics, and pain points, in hospitals and clinics is room “turn time” — how quickly a room can be cleaned, disinfected and made available for the next patient. Recommendations from the Association for the Healthcare Environment Services (AHE) suggest minimum room-turn times of 45 minutes, but rising concerns around infection risks and added cleaning protocols may push that number higher. By deploying robotic floor scrubbing machines to handle routine floor cleaning, healthcare organisations can re-allocate cleaning staff to spend more time on the complex, high-touch requirements of cleaning and disinfecting a patient room in between uses.

Why Tennant? The T7AMR Robotic Floor Scrubber received 2019’s Good Design Award. The awards program, celebrating its 70th year, and organised by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design along with Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd., recognises and honors industry leaders in design and manufacturing that have created innovative products in the marketplace. The winners of the award are determined by a jury of design professionals and industry specialists, and are judged on the quality of design, function, and aesthetics of the product.

The T7AMR was selected a winner in the Industrial category, alongside products such as a micro plastics-sensing autonomous underwater vehicle, a robotic reach truck, and a vacuum chamber machine. There are a total of 29 categories in the Good Design Awards competition, including electronics, furniture, personal devices, pet products, and robotics.

Our T7AMR operator training is both classroom and field based. Conducted on-site by our trained robotics technicians we provide operators access to the latest updates and ‘easy to read’ reporting backed by our remote TAC (Technical Advisory Centre) support for peace of mind. A partnership you can depend on with Tennant backed by National Service offering of 40+ trained technicians and genuine parts and consumables availability.

The Tennant T7AMR deployment experience is seamless and ensures every part of the T7AMR journey is supported. Call our Robotics team on 1800 226 843 to start your journey today!

Download the entire eBook on T7AMR and Healthcare here: http://eweb.tennantco.com/tennantcocom-an23h/pages/e093446568c7ea11a812000d3a8b3117.html