by Fritz Smith
The medical field has always benefitted from the advancement of science and technology. As technology improves, doctors and healthcare professionals can innovate new ways to diagnose and treat patients. Robotics has come a long way in the past two decades, and hospitals have already started incorporating robots to assist nurses, doctors and even surgeons!
Assistant Bots
Having a robot sanitize rooms is a great way to decrease the risk of spreading infection from one area of a hospital to another. That is because robots cannot become sick and are much easier to clean and disinfect with harsh chemicals that would be unsafe for humans.
There is a robot that uses UV rays to disinfect hospital rooms instead of traditional cleaning supplies. Instead, it uses powerful Ultraviolet rays (UV) to cleanse a hospital room. Microorganisms, like viruses and bacteria, are vulnerable to UV rays. After a few minutes of harsh UV exposure, the room will be ready for the next patient.
Some robots in the hospital will have jobs assisting nurses. Nurses are the backbone of the hospital and can use all the help they can get. There is a friendly robot named Moxi that goes around the hospital with supplies making sure that nurses have all the tools they need to do their jobs with a lower risk of spreading infection around. Moxi is also quite photogenic, posing for selfies with patients, friends, and families!
A Pill Sized Bot
Another little helper in the hospital is a tiny robot the size of a pill. These devices can be swallowed to transmit accurate video footage and pictures to doctors for them to identify any issues in the stomach or intestines. Before these minuscule robots, in order to look inside of a person’s stomach, medical examiners had to put a camera at the end of a wire and feed it down the esophagus. Now it is much easier and less invasive for doctors to get a clue about what is going on inside of the patient’s body.
Surgery Bots
The DaVinci Surgery bot is a sophisticated machine that functions more as a tool than an autonomous robot. A professional surgeon operates this machine with the practice and care that a musician would play an instrument. The mechanical limbs of the DaVinci follow the controls of the operator. The steady arms of the bot never flinch and they provide the surgeon with a view inches away from the tissue they are operating on. Currently, the DaVinci bot is used in minimally invasive surgeries, but the technology is expected to advance and become more integrated within hospitals. So, if you ever need to undergo surgery, it might be mechanical limbs doing the work while the doctor in the other room.
Robotics in healthcare is likely to become more common in the coming decades. With an aging population in the United States, Japan, and many other countries, robots being able to assist nurses and staff will become all the more helpful. Being able to perform the monotonous tasks that take up valuable time, robotic assistants can provide healthcare professionals with more time to do what they do best.
Research to start the article
- https://interestingengineering.com/15-medical-robots-that-are-changing-the-world
- https://robotics.sites.stanford.edu/research/medical-robotics
- https://www.e-spincorp.com/medical-robotics-types-of-medical-robots-in-healthcare/
- https://www.medtechintelligence.com/feature_article/the-era-of-the-robot-nurse/
- https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/endiatx-pillbot-stomach-cam-swims-torrey-smith/
