Robots in Hospitals: Types, Applications and Advantages
The World Health Organization predicts a shortfall of 18 million health care workers by 2030. This article explores the robots that enable healthcare operations keep on going.
The population aging, a dwindling healthcare workforce, and a rise in chronic disease are major worries for many countries.
Moreover, the epidemic has expedited robotics and logistics development, exposing the daily dangers that healthcare personnel face. In fact, based on WHO figures, at least 115,000 healthcare professionals have dead due to Covid as of May 2021.
Hospital Robots provide a reliable solution since they perform various tasks to relieve doctors, nurses, and surgeons of their everyday responsibilities with low or no value added.
Robots have become a vital element of many hospitals' workforces, performing everything from surgeries to administrative labor.
What Types of Robots are used in Hospitals?
Medical robots fall into four categories:
- Hospital Mobile Robots
- Surgical Robots
- Care Robots
- Exoskeletons
Robotic surgery aids surgeons in conducting minimally invasive surgeries by serving as their eyes.
Healthcare offers many opportunities for autonomous mobile robots applications. There are mobile robots that clean, carry linen, meals or medicines.
There are other robots able to participate in hospital upkeep, promote patients’ recuperation, and even engage with transferring patients back to bed outside of operation rooms, helping to lessen the "back-breaking" job that human caregivers do.
Robots can take on heavy lifting and manual labor so that nurses can focus on giving excellent clinical care to patients.
Let's take a look at each of these robots individually.
Mobile Robot Applications in Hospitals
Materials Transportation
Robots can make the most difference by assisting healthcare staff in taking on labor-intensive duties or demanding a high level of precision.
Robotics has much helped to improve operator's lives by allowing them to avoid the "five Ds": dirty, dangerous, demeaning, degrading, or driving tasks.
Hospital pharmacies can utilize robots to store, pick, return, and refill pharmaceuticals autonomously, saving costs and inefficiencies.
In hospitals, AGV Robots transport:
· Dishes between the kitchen and the ward and empty trays back to the kitchen.
· Trash cans and trolleys Management of full and empty containers.
· Transportation of linens (clean and soiled).
· Delivery of cleaning carts/trolleys and turn-on cart-washing systems.
· Transportation of sterile supplies
· Hospital medications and other supplies (laboratories, wards, pharmacies, theaters).
Cleaning and Disinfecting
The Autonomous Navigation has contributed to develop new types of robots useful for healthcare operations. For example, mobile robotics is also being developed to disinfect medical instruments, equipment and environments.
UVC Disinfection Mobile Robots
There will be several changes enacted during the "new normalization phase" due to the impact of COVID-19 on the global health system.
The implications are far, affecting everything we do, including how we travel, engage and associate with one another, and the increased requirement for sanitization and disinfection.
UVC mobile robots have received much interest in the last two years. In fact, agvnetwork has published a dedicated whitepaper about these robots where we explain the different specifications, manufacturers, etc.
| Click here to download the whitepaper |
UVC is an excellent technique of destroying bacteria, and it is currently employed to disinfect hospital rooms, purify water, and sterilize air ducts (only to name a few).
UVC Mobile Robots are an infection prevention system that irradiates a patient's room intelligently while a supervisor monitors it in real-time from afar.
UVC robotics is an integrated component of the janitorial crew, helping maintain a cleaner facility while ensuring that workers are kept safe. It also implies that janitors can refocus their efforts on higher-value duties.
Autonomous Floor Scrubbers
Hospital facilities must automate one of their most labor-intensive processes: floor cleaning due to overloaded personnel and rigorous quality standards.
Currently, manually operated scrubbers serve this purpose. However, they cannot assess whether areas have been sufficiently cleaned without heat maps.
Robotic Floor Scrubbers are needed in hospital networks to cleanse as effectively as contemporary manual scrubbers while navigating safely through busy locations.
Like other autonomous driving robots, a safety mechanism is required to detect oncoming people and halt the robot if they approach within a specific range.
The automated floor scrubbing equipment generates a heat map to illustrate which regions have been cleaned at any particular time. It is critical for accountability and hazard prevention.
Additionally, the heat map should change colour over time, with a dynamically defined expiry period. A time log of activities and tasks is also required.
Cleaning compliance tracing capabilities enabled by sophisticated mapping technology include:
- Real-time heat maps tracking surfaces as they are being cleaned
- Location of scrubbers in real-time on a predefined route
- Desktop, mobile, and web-based compliance tracking dashboards
Mobile Smart Telecare Robots
Telecare systems allow doctors to monitor patients who are at home and identify problems early.
Telecare is a generally established idea in the field of care. Information and communication technology is used to provide care in contemporary concepts.
Sensors put in the living environment collect data on geriatric behaviours to provide assistance as needed and provide clients with feedback when something goes wrong.
The target audiences of teleoperated care robots are those who suffer from severe age-related difficulties, the severely ill, and persons with physical disabilities.
Operators at the central homecare organization can monitor and control many robots simultaneously in multiple client houses or elderly residences
Also, the patient can directly interface with the robot himself (e.g., from their wheelchair) via a tablet. In this instance, the administrative unit can monitor what's going on.
Surgical Robots
The most typical application of robotics in surgery is the employment of mechanical arms that are coupled either with a camera or with surgical instruments and operated by a surgeon.
Thanks to robot-assisted operations, complex processes are conducted with greater precision and control.
They are frequently minimally invasive, providing an alternative to open operations, which carry greater dangers and need a more prolonged recovery.
Biopsies, the excision of cancerous tumors, the replacement of heart valves, and gastric bypass surgery are all examples of robot-assisted treatments.
Surgical robots usually have a high-resolution 3D vision system and tiny wristed devices that bend and spin significantly more than a human hand.
The surgeon has complete control over the robotic surgery system at all times, allowing them to do more accurate surgeries now than ever before.
A robot-assisted procedure has numerous advantages. The use of robotics in surgery benefits patients directly (shorter recuperation time) and indirectly (better visual perspective for the surgeon, resulting in a more precision surgery).
Other advantages include:
- Improved recovery time
- Quicker return to normal activities
- Increased surgeon dexterity and range of motion
- Less infection risk
- Fewer blood transfusions and blood losses
- An image of the surgical field is highly magnified and high-definition for the surgeon
- Less hospital stay
- Less discomfort
Patients who are elderly or incapacitated can benefit from the assistance of robots. The future will see Care robots rely upon more sophisticated jobs, such as prompting patients to take their medications and providing emotional support.
In addition, they can help nurses with various activities, including collecting blood and monitoring temperatures, and enhancing patient cleanliness.
There are as many robots as jobs to accomplish presently deployed in care settings.
Patients upset by dementia's confusing symptoms can be comforted and calmed by doll-like therapy robots.
The modern version of care robots can do considerably more than physical duties. They supply all those human caretakers and family members, from intellectual stimulation to social interaction.
The exoskeleton detects electrical impulses in the patient's body via sensors put on their skin and responds by moving their joints. It's intended to help people recover from lower-body problems, including strokes and paralysis, by physical therapy.
Patients with gait training with an exoskeleton robot had better balance while walking even outside the device.
The patients recovered by an exoskeleton after having brain trauma, stroke, or partial spinal cord damage enhance their walking speed and distance.
Therapists evaluate each patient individually to guarantee that the exoskeleton robotics device is the best therapy option for their injuries and aspirations. Each tailored session is to each patient and therapist's gait training objectives. The feedback provided by the device will also aid in achieving these objectives.
This technology will evolve and improve becoming more interconnected with other healthcare technologies and gadgets.
Nurses will have additional opportunities to participate in the development and deployment of exoskeletons in various healthcare settings.
As a result, nurses should collaborate more closely with roboticists and software developers to guarantee that this developing bionic technology is appropriately designed and built before being integrated and utilized with patients, caregivers, and practicing experts.
What are the benefits of robotics in healthcare?
The widespread usage of robots in the delivery of healthcare services indicates that robots will become a familiar sight in the not-too-distant future.
Robotics can change the industry due to various applications and benefits in the healthcare industry. It benefits both healthcare practitioners and patients equally.
Because robotic surgery involves fewer incisions than manual surgery, it has lowered the chance of infection and resulted in a shorter hospital stay. Because it is less intrusive, it decreases bleeding and transfusions and the length of the patient's recovery. These also reduce physician effort while reducing stress and making the process less frightening for patients.
Robots that provide logistics, medical care, and disinfection are less expensive than human operators, are easy to maintain and operate.
What are some disadvantages of medical robots?
There are two sides to every coin. Although there are several advantages to using robots to conduct chores in healthcare, there is also the possibility of mistakes and malfunctions.
- Initial investment is very high. A cutting-edge surgery robot can cost around $2 million. Today, patients pay roughly $3,000 to $6,000 more for robotic surgery than for traditional surgery.
- Who is responsible for mistakes made by robots? The problem is that you can't blame anyone in particular. If not them, then who? Who is the creator? Did the surgeon use it? There is no doubt that this is a legally ambiguous subject, and as a result, it has sparked several debates, particularly in the realm of ethics.
- If you need to deal with robots, you'll need to teach medical personnel how to operate them, which might take some time. Quite a bit of time.
- Healthcare robots have characteristics, that are not found on other devices. They can replace caregivers, surgeons or provide psychological or motor rehabilitation. The implications of hospital robots in a programming error or a sabotage are high. Traditional problems can be found. However, many others are added and many of them are related to cybersecurity issues.
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