Robotics and Health care
Navigate the future!!
We, humans, have been inclined towards robotic development for a long time. It started around 400–350 BC, when a robotic steam-powered pigeon, used to the die caster, was created by Ewing Township in 1961. We have come a long way since then. Today there is no field where you don’t have robots in use, from robots helping farmers in fields to robots fighting on the border with fellow soldiers. Our fantasy towards robots is clear from sci-fi movies we watch and make, from terminator to metropolis. We have been trying to make a perfect robot for a long time.
What is a robot?
When you hear the word “robot,” the first thing that probably comes to mind is a humanoid, the T-800 from The Terminator. But an autonomous drone-like the Skydio is also a robot. Robots can almost be anything today, and this is just starting their proliferation.
With so many different kinds of robots, how do you define what one is? It’s a physical thing !! Engineers agree on that, at least. Consider two cars, the first one driven using RC control, and the second one being autonomous, which among them will you call a robot? Are they both robots? Nope. Anyway, we go with the most generalized definition of “Robot,” i.e. A machine designed to execute one or more tasks automatically with speed and precision. A robot in Czech is a word that means a servant or a worker. The word Robot was coined in 1920 by Czech novelist Karel Capek in a play titled Rossum’s Universal Robots. The definition of a robot given by Robotic Institute of America in 1979 is as follows “A robot is a re-programmable multifunctional manipulator designed to mobilize objects, equipment, or any unique gadgets through variable programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks.”
Robots in medicine
The impact of robotics in medicine is undeniable. The Da Vinci framework of the company “Intuitive Surgical” has been examined in more than 4,000 peer-checked publications. It was cleared by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for various classes of activities and was utilized in 80% of radical prostatectomies acted in the U.S. for 2008.
Although the clinical robotic systems used to date are assistive and lack any real autonomy, this will undoubtedly change. As our comprehension of how to utilize robotics in the facility develops, we will keep building a more profound understanding of how to make progressively intelligent and increasingly competent surgical robots.
Robots are used in varied ways. These include their usage for surgical assistance, rehabilitation, telepresence, medical transportation, sanitation, etc.
1. Surgical Assistants
The most widely used clinical robotic surgical system includes a camera arm and mechanical arms with surgical instruments attached to them. The surgeon controls the arms while seated at a computer console near the operating table. The Da Vinci Surgical System is one such robotic system used today.
2. Sanitization and Disinfection Robots
With the increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria and outbreaks of deadly infections like COVID 19, more healthcare facilities are using robots to clean and disinfect surfaces.
3. Telepresence
Physicians use robots to assist them with looking at and treat patients in rustic or remote areas, giving them a “telepresence” in the room. One such robot is Double 3, a self-driving, a two-wheeled videoconferencing robot that revolutionizes the way you work or learn remotely. Double enables telecommuters, doctors, remote workers, and students to feel more connected to their colleagues by giving them a physical presence where they can’t be in person.
4. Neurological
Cerebrum medical procedure includes getting to a covered objective encompassed by sensitive tissue, an undertaking that profits by the capacity for robots to make exact and precise movements dependent on clinical pictures. Subsequently, the primary distributed record exploring the utilization of a robot in human medical procedure was in 1985 for cerebrum biopsy utilizing a figured computed tomography (CT) picture and a stereotactic outline.
5. Rehabilitation Robots
These play a crucial role in the recovery of people with disabilities, including improved mobility, strength, coordination, and quality of life. These robots can be programmed to adapt to the condition of each patient as they recover from strokes, traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries, or neurobehavioral or neuromuscular diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Virtual reality integrated with rehabilitation robots can also improve balance, walking, and other motor functions.
6. Radiosurgery
Radiosurgery is a treatment (not a surgery), in which focused beams of ionizing radiation are directed at the patient, primarily to treat tumors. By directing the beam through the tumor at various orientations, high-dose radiation is delivered to the tumor while the surrounding tissue receives significantly less radiation. Prior to real-time tissue tracking, radiosurgery was practically limited to treating the brain using stereotactic frames mounted to the skull with bone screws. Now that real-time tissue tracking is feasible, systems are commercially available.
How Robots Are Helping to Fight the Corona-virus Outbreak
We envision that the future of healthcare will involve an integration of robotics and telemedicine that we call telenursing. Tele-nursing is the idea that a human nurse can remotely control a robot to perform most (or many) of the tasks involved in patient’s care. In other words, the robot becomes the nurse’s eyes, ears, and body. The components needed to make telenursing possible — robotic manipulation, teleconferencing, augmented reality, health sensors, and low-latency communication networks — are becoming increasingly mature. As telenursing becomes more capable, nurses will be able to perform a large portion of patient care through robots, reducing the rates of PPE usage, and improving social distancing.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend toward increased use of robotics and telemedicine in healthcare is accelerating. Both technologies have the potential to aid in social distancing, which reduces the rate of healthcare-acquired infections for patients and personnel.
Hospitals have already been using autonomous robots to disinfect hospital rooms with ultraviolet light, transfer specimen samples, deliver food, medicine, and supplies, and greet patients and provide information. And although telemedicine is most heavily applied to in-home remote consultation, hospitals and nursing schools are increasingly using telepresence robots such as those from VGo, Beam, and Double Robotics. These “Skype-on-wheels” platforms allow for communication with patients, visual inspection, and driving around a room to view equipment and monitors. In the COVID-19 response, mobile telepresence robots with video screens and touchscreen interfaces have been adopted in Italy to let healthcare workers check on patients without physically entering quarantine rooms.
What next?
There is still a lot that mankind has to achieve in this domain of tech and I am sure someday we will be more than humans and we will have powers that are not supernatural but amazing.
But still, the question remains the same: Are we ready for this change?? Are we ready for an automated future??
As for the persistent notion of a post-apocalyptic hellscape patrolled by homicidal cyborgs, that’s probably pure fiction. What we’re living through now, and what the future holds more of, is what roboticist Ken Goldberg has described as “multiplicity.” It’s much friendlier than what’s known as “the singularity,” a point at which humans are (hypothetically) overtaken by fully autonomous and even sentient robots. In fact, Goldberg told Wired in 2018, multiplicity is “something that’s happening right now, and it’s the idea of humans and machines working together.” When you order up a car via Uber or Lyft, that’s multiplicity. Or when, down the road, you ride in a self-driving vehicle — that’s multiplicity too. “The way we have to start thinking about robots is not as a threat, but as something that we can work within a collaborative way,” he added. “A lot of it is changing our own attitudes.”
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”-Alan Kay
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