Add to favorites

#Product Trends

From Surgeries To Keeping Company: The Place Of Robots In Healthcare

Assisting surgeries, disinfecting rooms, dispensing medication, keeping company: believe it or not these are the tasks medical robots will soon undertake in hospitals, pharmacies, or your nearest doctor’s office. These new ‘colleagues’ will definitely make a difference in every field of medicine. Here’s our overview to understand robotics in healthcare better so that everyone can prepare for the appearance of mechanic helpers in medical facilities.

Metallic allies for the benefit of the vulnerable

While there are concerns for machines replacing people in the workforce, we believe there are advantages to the renewal of the distribution of tasks. Machines don’t need sleep or food, don’t have prejudices and definitely won’t grunt about why they need to complete the same monotonous tasks for the thousandth time – for example washing up the hospital floor or bringing medicine up the 10th floor.

Thus, we could imagine how healthcare robots could take over administrative and/or monotonous tasks that people like to skip anyway while medical professionals, doctors, and nurses can truly devote their precious time to the job that they signed up for – caring for the sick and vulnerable.

With some preparation and forethought, we can make sure the human touch stays relevant in medicine while taking advantage of our metallic allies. For this reason, we collected here the most useful robots in healthcare.

1) Metalheads for surgical precision

Surgery is an unpleasant experience at best. The waiting lists can be long depending on available manpower and resources. Thus, surgical robots are the prodigies of surgery. According to market analysis, the industry is about to boom. By 2020, surgical robotics sales are expected to almost double to $6.4 billion.

The most commonly known surgical robot is the da Vinci Surgical System, and believe it or not, it was introduced already 15 years ago! It features a magnified 3D high-definition vision system and tiny wristed instruments that bend and rotate far greater than the human hand. While the surgeon is 100% in control of the robotic system at all times, they are able to carry out more precise operations than previously thought possible.

Others are interested in the surgical robotics field, too. Google has announced in 2015 that it started working with the pharma giant Johnson&Johnson in creating a surgical robot system in the framework of Verb Surgical. In early 2018, Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin used the robot to suture on some synthetic tissue. Since then, J&J bought Auris, which has been developing robotic technologies focused on lung cancer and acquired Orthotaxy, a privately held developer of software-enabled surgical technologies.

2) Blood-drawing and disinfector robots help put ‘care’ back into healthcare

During a hospital stay, patients interact with nurses the most. Like Shiva, the eight-armed Indian goddess, they are there, usually in 12-hour shifts, to draw blood, check your vital signs, monitor your condition and take care of your hygiene if needed. They are often overwhelmed by physically and mentally daunting tasks, and the result is often an unpleasant experience for everyone involved.

Robotic nurses will help carry this burden in the future. They are designed to be able to carry out repetitive and monotonous tasks, so human staff has more energy to deal with issues that require human decision-making skills, creativity, and most of all, care and empathy. One day, blood-drawing robots may relieve nurses from this burdening exercise, they might even perform lab tests without the intervention of humans.

The TUG autonomous mobile delivery robot might also become the favorite of nurses. It is able to carry around a multitude of racks, carts or bins up to 453 kilograms in the form of medications, laboratory specimens or other sensitive materials – so the hospital staff can do other, more important assignments. The TUG is sent or requested using a touch screen interface and upon completing its “mission”, it returns to the charging dock for a sip of energy while it is loaded for the next job. The TUG has become commonplace in hospitals and makes over 50,000 deliveries each week in over 140 hospitals throughout the United States.

3) Robotic assistance for a better life

But robotics in healthcare means so much more than drawing blood or carrying around racks. With remote-controlled medical robots, such as the ones developed by Anybots caretakers can interact with their patients, check on their living conditions and the need for further appointments. This would help efficiency a great deal by eliminating time-consuming home visits.

Another company, Luvozo, created Sam, the robotic concierge, and tested first in a leading senior living community in the Washington D.C. area. The human-sized, smiling robot combines the very best in cutting-edge technology and human touch to provide frequent check-ins and non-medical care for residents in long-term care settings. By doing so, it reduces the costs of care, while raises patient satisfaction index by simply being there for the elderly all the time.

4) Telemedical network for increasing accessibility

Chances are you have been in a situation before where, if an accident were to happen, medical professionals would not have been able to reach you in time. To some of us in the developed world, it’s a rare occurrence. But even in 2016, millions live outside the reach of conventional emergency services be it in Vanuatu or the Inuit communities up North in Canada.

With InTouch Health, Doctor on Demand, Health Tap, American Well, Teladoc, Avizia, or Babylon Health, patients in remote areas have access to high-quality emergency consultations for stroke, cardiovascular, dermatological problems, or any other complaints. On the patient’s side, it can be accessed on a tablet or personal computer, and clinicians can also use the same type of devices as best suits their needs.

5) The power of exoskeletons

You have seen them in movies, taken advantage of them in video games and now they are here for real: exoskeletons. These robotic structures will truly give a sense of invincibility to people by helping human beings move around and lift heavy weights – or themselves. For example, a gait-training exoskeleton suit helped Matt Ficarra, paralyzed from the chest down, walk down the aisle on his wedding day. In the future, it is easy to imagine how soldiers, surgeons, but even warehouse workers and nurses who move around patients will use exoskeletons on a daily basis in order to extend their muscle power, stamina, and weightlifting skills.

They are already helping medical professionals get through long hours of surgery, moreover, in its latest piece of news, BBC talks about a French man who has been able to move all four of his paralyzed limbs with a mind-controlled exoskeleton suit. Even the FDA recognized its utility for rehabilitation. In 2019, ReWalk Robotics, a leading exoskeleton-manufacturing company announced that the agency cleared the company’s ReStore soft exo-suit system for sale to rehabilitation centers across the United States.

6) Robots in the supply chain

Robots can not only undertake monotonous and repetitive tasks, but also those that are potentially dangerous for humans – such as moving heavy boxes or testing solutions. For example, one of Boston Dynamics’ robots, Petman, was designed for testing chemical protection clothing for the U.S. military. It’s also useful in emergency situations that are too dangerous for humans.

Beyond robots that could be placed in situations potentially harmful for humans, robotics could have a big impact on pharmaceutical distribution chains, too. Robotic medical dispenser systems, medication management solutions such as the PharmASSIST ROBOTx help any given facility “right-size” its system for its volume. It is also an emerging best practice that these robots are designed with robust data mining capabilities, so pharmacies can gain valuable insights about their traffic and efficiency all the time. If medical robots were used for such tasks, pharmacists would have the time and the incentive to participate in the social aspect of healing: educate people of preventive measures, give practical advice and therefore make sure that healthcare truly becomes caring.

7) Robots disinfecting hospital rooms

Hospital-acquired infections (HAI) are among the leading causes of death in the US. CDC statistics used by Xenex show that in the United States, 1 in every 25 patients will contract an HAI. Of those, 1 in 9 will die.

In addition to the human cost, it takes its toll financially. These infections cost more than $30 billion dollars a year. Xenex, a Texas-based company produces a unique robot. It uses high-intensity ultraviolet light to disinfect any space in a healthcare facility quickly and efficiently. The Xenex Robot is more effective in causing cellular damage to microorganisms than any other device designed for disinfection, and thus it reduces the number of HAIs. It’s yet another example of how robotics in healthcare helps hospital staff to decrease workload and to lead to a more germ-free environment.

8) Nanorobots swimming in blood

While we have definitely not reached the era of nanotechnology, trends point towards the technology becoming more and more significant. With the emergence of digestibles and digital pills, we get step by step closer to nanorobots. On that front: researchers from the Max Planck Institute have been experimenting with exceptionally micro-sized – smaller than a millimeter – robots that literally swim through your bodily fluids and could be used to deliver drugs or other medical relief in a highly-targeted way. These scallop-like microbots are designed to swim through non-Newtonian fluids, like your bloodstream, around your lymphatic system, or across the slippery goo on the surface of your eyeballs.

The origami robot, despite its size, is just as impressive as a super-strong carrier one. When swallowed, the capsule containing it dissolves in the patient’s stomach and unfolds itself. Controlled by a technician with the help of magnetic fields it can patch up wounds in the stomach lining or safely remove foreign items such as swallowed toys.

9) Social companion robots to cheer up and keep you company

With the advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence, social companion robots started to take shape: these human or animal-shaped, smaller or bigger mechanic creatures are able to carry out different tasks and have interactions with humans and their environment. In the future, they might become every parent’s little helper in the kitchen, might support the guard dog in keeping the house safe, might teach the children and be their companion and support the elderly from reminding them to take their medication until keeping them company when they feel lonely.

Jibo, Pepper, Paro, Zora, and Buddy are all existing examples for caring social companion robots. Some of them even have touch sensors, cameras, and microphones, thus their owners can get into discussions with them, ask them to find a great concert for that night or just remind them about their medications.

Robot Zora is seen in Hospital Jouarre, in a small town Jouarre outside Paris on August 30, 2018. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

Small and big, smiley and faceless, surgical and pharma dispensing ones: robotics moves in all shapes and forms with big leaps into healthcare. That might be scary for many but they have the potential to do good: to bring medical care to regions where there is none to be found; to make the production and distribution of pharmaceuticals cheaper and more efficient; to lighten the load of medical professionals; to help people walk again.

To reap the benefits and avoid the potential dangers of such a technological revolution, we need to keep ourselves informed about the strides that science makes so that we can better prepare and adapt to the not-so-distant future where medical robots play a crucial role and work closely with us.

Details

  • Washington, DC, USA
  • The Medical Futurist