Slashdot Mirror
Robots in Hospitals
Dieppe writes "Robot couriers are being used in hospitals CNN. The robots are being used as delivery 'bots to deliver medicine and other hospital supplies. They are polite, and even can be overly cautious. I wonder if at night they supply them with saws, arms and other cutting devices and let them at each other? Turns out they're cost effective as well!"
There was a comic I won at a school fair in the late 60's, with cover ripped off (probably return donated by distributor) Magnus Robot Fighter, which would fit the bill rather well.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I suppose that the medical industry has to do SOMETHING about the lack of employees in the growing healthcare industry.
Uh, I think we all know what happens next.
Robots are also being used in delicate surgeries, to ease hand tremors by the surgeon. They use various methods of control, but the basic idea is the doctor is in a different room and the robot in the operating room, weilding the scalpel, clamps, camera, etc.
ResidntGeek
So basically, nothing has changed since Tron?
Or since the kit-based "line follower" robots, for that matter.
(Yes, I know that most other bots are smarter than that, I used to live across the street from Pyxis. Get over it, I did RTFM.)
Doctor: Scalpel.
Robot: Scalpel.
Doctor: Domo arigato, Nurse Roboto.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
The HelpMate asks people, "please examine my contents," when it makes a delivery.
I can't wait to see what phrase gets hacked into the voice processsor to replace this informative gem.
Have you Meta Moderated t
In Germany, an US product called RoboDoc was working for several years doing pre-programmed hip joint operations. Several hundreds of victims are now preparing to sue the hospitals - the ensanguined operations have led to severe destructions in nerves, muscles and bones.
There are some serious advantages to using robots more intensively in hospitals. For one thing, you don't have to worry about robots walking off with narcotics intended for the patients-which is more than you can say for a big chunk of doctors/nurses and other hospital staff.
Too bad that they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
dinner: it's what's for beer
In the brave new world, the terrorists will come armed with coloured tape to control the robot hoards.
Evil people are out to get you.
Oh, yeah. I can just see the original thinkers at Hollywood, Inc. making a movie about these.
Hey! We could call it "I Robot"! Man, I can hear Asimov rolling around in his coffin...
My mother (an RN) was recently complaining about the hospital she works in going to using computers in place of paper to do all the patient reports. She had a fit when I told her the local hospitals are using laptops and scanners in every room and medicines are kept lockedup until the nurse scans the patient ID. After the computer verifies the patient it then unlocks the proper drawer so the nurse can get the proper medicine. Now this comes along and she will end up in a nut house for sure.
Sig temporarily out of service.
University of Virginia Hospital could save as much as $218,000 a year if it replaced 15 human couriers with six HelpMate robots, which would pay for themselves in little over three years.
Its not just IT workers that are in danger, and its not just Indian workers that are taking away jobs.
But thats just how the world works. Invention brings about efficiency but it also opens new avenues for humans. After all H. Ford's assembly line has created a net gain in jobs, right?
I for one welcome our new ... bah, hello nurse :)
These would be very useful in performing all the menial hospital tasks and free up nurses to do the more important stuff. For instance, why not have bots that empty bedpans, scrub/disinfect the floors (and vac up the occasional 'urp). It would also be beneficial to have 'bots for retrieving/turning the hefty or bedridden patients. This would also help in lowering the nursing staff injuries due to fatty-tossing (I have relatives that routinely lift 500+ lb'ers).
The day when the robots are seen searching the hospital records for a particular "Sarah Connor"
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
Ya know, some people made a lot of money with ideas that were half as good as yours.
This is how patients can escape!
I can just imagine the doctor...
"hmmm... I put in a order for morphine an hour ago I wonder what is taking the robot so long."
I guess that is why arming these things is necessary.
The HelpMate asks people, "please examine my contents," when it makes a delivery.
Goatse-bot is one step closer to reality.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
They have been doing this kind of stuff, with heavy loads in automated factories and warehouses. What is new?
I would hope these things go through a daily or weekly cleaning routine. It isn't like a human that can wash their hands, robots don't give a darn about personal hygine.
Perhaps they are even cleaner than humans, however they probably have a lot of people touching them.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
... a minor flaw that allows the robots to think for themselves. They learn to do the doctor's jobs better than the doctors, and are about to replace them entirely when an angry mob of surgeons breaks into the hospital, smashes the robots optical receptors in with the blunt end of a bedpan and dismembers the helpeless helpful machines with operating room saws, and everything goes back to how God intended it to be.
The end.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Works just like the article says - takes drugs from the pharmacy to the floor. Fairly straightforward, really. I'm honestly surprised there aren't more in use - most hospitals (of any real size - I'm not counting all the rural 30- and 40-bed hospitals) use a pneumatic tube system of some sort to deliver meds to the floors, and those are notoriously difficult and expensive to maintain.
After I was abducted by an alien space ship and traveled into the future, I was held hostage with the alien craft in a secret facility. I then used one of these that brought my food to sneak back to the space ship and travel back into the past!
These things are great and very versitile!
I just saw that the Federal Reserve in NY uses robots to store gold. No security check, nobody to sue when a ton of bricks drops on them.
In hospitals, they have to have more avoidance routines, but you could secure narcotics in a safe for delivery to wards and automatically track robot locations.
They're a great win. But have been around for a while.
Now, if they were in the shape of a giant penguin, I could see the relevance to slashdot!
The arrival of the robotic hospital
Please tell me I'm not the only one who is reminded of R.A.L.F. (Robotic Assistant Labor Facilitator) from Flight of the Navigator?
You probably shouldn't click this.
>I wonder if at night they supply them with saws,
>arms and other cutting devices and let them at each
>other? Turns out they're cost effective as well!
The first rule of Robot Club is _no_ talking about Robot Club.
So you're dinking around, posting whinges on /. instead of getting off your fat duff and starting you're own robot making assembly line. What do you want, applause?
You know an upcoming story will undoubtably involve people getting stupid patents for robots that can thread a needle or dodge a puddle.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What'd be better would be displaying a picture at the same time..
Just imagine.. a robot going around showing goatse's picture, saying "Please examine my contents"
At least it was in Wichita, KS. I remember a co-worker getting run over as he tried to repair a printer and had his legs out in the hallway. The thing didn't catch him and he was semi-pinned between the door jam, the printer, and the robot. This was like 1996 or so.
:)
Sounds like they haven't changed much. These followed tape on the floor and asked you to move if they detected you. Maybe their detection has gotten a bit better
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Actual picture: http://www.starwars.com/databank/droid/mousedroid/ img/movie_bg.jpg
I don't know about you guys, but our hospitals up in Canada don't allow the use of cell phones within the building. I guess they figure that they may interfere with some of the life support machinery. Now their allowing some robots to run around? Sounds a little iffy to me don't you think? I think I would be a little scared if I was half-a-wake and some nurse was giving me some needle that a robot just handed her. You might even think you were abducted by aliens!
Well, sort of anyway. I work in alot of hospitals all around the country. Anyway, at one of the hospitals, I get in the elivator on the first floor, push the button for the 3rd floor and the door closed.
The elivator stops on the second floor and one of these robots get in. It took what seemed like forever for it to get in the elivator and get turned around. Once it had turned the right way in the elivator it then proceeded to make a bunch of tones.
The doors closed, and the elivator began to move, it then bypassed my floor went all the way to the 8th floor. Where it got out and left me standing their.
Apparently at this hospital the robots have priority on all elivator trafic. It simply overrode my selection and put in its own.
Damn Robots.
Therein lies the greatest potential for future trouble. One of the greatest fears of robots and machines in general, aside from them going out of control, has been that they are cheap labor and take away jobs. Yes, the same fears abounded when computers were first being introduced into the marketplace. Fortunately the shift was smoother than expected (though certainly not complete yet). Hopefully society can make the transition to increased robotics with as much ease as that one.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
At least you can auto-clave robot hands... /.) bacteria killing surfaces.
And yes, I do realize you can auto-clave human hands too, but only once.
Plus, the robot won't pick his nose between rooms.
Perhaps the robot could be coated with one of the previously mentioned (here on
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
While yes, these robots can replace a human for delivering supplies, keep in mind that hospitals have used volunteers for that job for years. These robots won't save a hospital 200,000 dollars a year until they replace the doctor. :0]
I remember a friend of the family talking about these, but the ones he worked on used infrared sensors with a digitized blueprint of the hospital. The robots can communicate wirelessly with all of the hospital elevators to move from floor to floor. For recharging, the robots move into a dock-like device to charge for the night. The robots (at least the ones in Children's) use the linux operating system and receive all instructions over the wifi network.
The main problem is that with all of the high-power equipment in the hospital, it wreaks havoc on the network's signal/noise ratio.
Also, the occasional robot goes into panic-mode on the elevator and ends up spinning around in circles while riding the elevator up and down until hospital personnel comes to reset it.
"I wonder if at night they supply them with saws, arms and other cutting devices and let them at each other?"
No seriously, that sentence just comes out of nowhere and goes absolutely nowhere. That's just stupid.
From another article:
"Tug is a beefed up, industrial version of Cye with a patent-protected navigation/tracking system that slashes its price thousands of dollars below the competition, according to Thorne. Other differentiating factors include Tug's enormous 500-pound hauling capacity and a retrofit kit to pull existing hospital carts."
You can find out more about Cye here.
Then again, military medicine seems to be quite a few years ahead of times. By the time I'd graduated from Operating Room Tech school in San Diego in 1993, I'd scrubbed in on many arthroscopic gall bladder removals and pretty much took them for granted. I was pretty surprised a couple of years ago to see a local newspaper bragging about how our hospital had recently acquired the equipment for "state-of-the-art arthroscopic gall bladder removal". One of my friends supervised the NHSD's digital imaging system in '94 or so, and the local civilian facility is just now completing a switchover to the same idea.
I wouldn't do it again if I had the choice, but we definitely had the coolest toys to play with.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This will make hosptials even more scary for an 8 year olds. I hope they make special effort to make the robots look cute!
Gamblers Forum
Of the two of them, one lied blatantly to the nation, so I think Kerry's word is the one I'll be trusting.
Pneumatic tubes would probably work better. If you REALLY want a robot, the robot could do the routing.
You forgot the part where the hero turns to the dark side and becomes a politician.
Anyone who thinks a robot can be "overly cautious" hasn't watched enough Arnold movies. I mean, unless the robot makes you sign reams of bureaucratic forms before it will do anything, or something like that.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Quite a while ago I saw a presentation from three competing teams for a hospital robot. The first team, lead by AI types had spent quite a bit of time trying to program intelligence into the robot so that it would be able to navigate through the hospital and go around people. That team was bested by another who simply painted a magnetic stripe on the floor and had the robot stop whenever there was movement within two feet ratio. The winner of the competition placed train tracks hanging from the ceiling and used a simple real time controller that handled electric toy locomotives delivering medicines to the rooms. The cost was that of a few tyco sets.
That's "hordes", you brainless shit-gobbling imbecile.
Hahahaha! What if, while dispencing medication, it also showed the tubgirl picture while saying "Dispencing medicine...please wait."
Red Bull gave me wings and I flew into the ceiling fan.
Even if he claims to be a Republicrat!
>> Oh, yeah. I can just see the original thinkers at Hollywood, Inc. making a movie about these.
> Hey! We could call it "I Robot"! Man, I can hear Asimov rolling around in his coffin...
Wow, the way you connected the dots there is just scary insightful.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I was reading up on this today before the article came up. Anyone interested or know of an open source attempt to make a diagnosis program?
The article here, Artificial Intelligence in Medical Diagnosis, is *extremely* good at reviewing the relevant points and giving a summary. If you want to program on the cutting edge of AI then this is where you want to be.
I draw the line at pilots.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Hartford Hospital used one for their patient's food service. It would be loaded up with food trays and would autonomously call the elevator and drive down the hallway to deliver the trays. After the meal, it would drive all the empty trays back to the kitchen. My job at the time was to enter patients food intake into a database. This was circa 1996.
Putnam Investments in Mass also has one that simply drives around reading a painted line that is only visible in ultra-violet light. It delivers the mail. Its pretty cool, but I have had a few isntances where it almost took my feet off going around a corner.
What? no Bender or "Robot Girlfriend" jokes yet?
Or did they get modded down out of oblivion?
Too many zeros, not enough ones
To hell with you! There's not a damn thing wrong with scanning pets! My dog would be DEAD now if a regular scan hadn't detected his throbmotic uiriosyntactic metascrofolosus of the anterior dithyramb!
You cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch. I hope your kitty turns into a fucking alligator.
I've never yet met anybody who'll admit to posting on Slashdot. So who are all these people?!
I'm currently working on obtaining the patent for a Asimov/Dead Author generator.
Preliminary tests show that as long as Hollywood exists they will churn out enough derivitive drivel to fuel the dead author's spin. By harnessing that spin we could do away with all other forms of electricity generation.
A second patent has been filed to collect the fury of Harlen Ellison and turn it into useful energy. Although when he dies he'll be added to the Dead Author Energy Farm(tm).
The final patent I have pending is to collect the energy spent for keystrokes from Slashdot users and turn it into something useful. I figure other garbage can be recycled into fuel - why not Slashdot posts.
"I wonder if at night they supply them with saws, arms and other cutting devices and let them at each other?"
m l
From http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2002/302_bots.ht
"Two robotic surgical systems have received FDA clearance to be marketed in the United States: The da Vinci Surgical System, made by Intuitive Surgical, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., is cleared to perform surgery under the direction of a surgeon. The ZEUS Robotic Surgical System, made by Computer Motion, Inc. of Goleta, Calif., has been cleared by the FDA to assist surgeons."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
By the end of the 21st century, creativity -- the creation of intellectual property -- will be the only currently known role that will still be the domain of us humans. And the control of that creativity is what is being fought for now.
That's the power struggle going on now. It's just started. One more thing. By the end of the 21st century, molecular genetics will have progressed to the point where most people will be able to live almost forever. Imagine living forever in a world where production and services basically cost nothing. The only thing of value will be control of the intellectual property behind it all.
Imagine a world where material items sell for a dollar each and services are provided for ten cents an hour. It could be paradise if you have the money to pay for what you want. But if you don't, how do you compete against such prices?
The challenge as we approach the 22nd century will be to rethink the issues of access. How will we reward innovation while making it possible for most people to survive and live reasonably good lives? Because, if most people cannot pay for those goods and services, there will be a revolution. If that revolution succeeds, those who were on top will be gone. If the revolution fails, the whole economic system will collapse from lack of customers.
Hang onto your hat. It's going to be a wild ride."
From: www.ProjectsDoneRight.com/pdr/pdrPapersIP.asp
Did'nt see the obligatory /. (funny) posts so decided to help.
... I am a medical robot
/.
I, for one, welcome our new medical robot overlords
U insensitve clod
In Soviet Russia the Medical robots hire u
Well it isnt funny but wasnt it supoosed to be
I have read several books published in the early 1980's which talked about these kind of robots. Most of them were about the size of a small chest freezer (about .75m x 1m x 1.5m), and followed a line on the floor, or a buried wire of some sort. Beacons or bar codes allowed the robots to recognize where they were at on the route.
While I don't have any references for these books, one book I do own, entitled "The Robot Book" by Robert Malone (copyright 1978, ISBN 0-15-678452-1), shows on page 22 a picture of a robot called the "Lear Siegler Mailmobile" - looks basically like a large and mobile mail slot tray. I encourage anyone with an interest in robotics to get a copy of this book - lots of large, great imagery of various robots, real and fictional, as well as automata and other "automatic" machinery from earlier periods (it includes several large images of Hughes Aircraft Mobots, and a great picture of the GE Hardiman exoskeleton).
Ever wonder why the "standard" test for a simple robot is a line following 'bot? Simply because this is a major industrial task used in a variety of robotic systems, even today (very robust if done properly). I remember taking a tour of a new newspaper publishing plant in my hometown when I was a kid - they had similar robots for loading large rolls of paper into the presses...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
PING
I HAVE A DELIVERY
PING
On a loop every 30 seconds until someone responded (annoying when you aren't well). IIRC it had numeric code and a different compartment for each nurses station, so no stealing from others.
Funniest was when it would encounter a wet floor sign or similar, and didn't know the difference btw that and a human. Would say "Excuse me, I need to get thru" 2-3x, then back up and go around.
Wonder if they had to pay royalties to Steven Hawking for having the robot simulate his voice?
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
I would have given you the story years ago. The robot has been running at our hospital since i can remember. Dont really remember much else about it, was news at one point a long time ago in a gal......
AGVS (Automatic Guided Vehicle Systems) have been in use in factories, hospitals, prisons, jails, mail rooms, etc. for a long time. The last real job I had (prior to becoming self employed) was as Service Manager for a robotics company that built AGVS with capacities ranging from 50lbs. to 6000lbs. and carried everything from the mundane mail and laundry to (exciting stuff!) explosives, and in one installation, people. Inmates, in fact, from the jail to the courthouse and back via an underground tunnel. Get busted, ride a robot!
One client company who shall remain nameless (hint: starts with an "I" and ends with "ntel") had problems with jealous employees sabotaging and abusing the AGV's in their factories, believing that they were replacing human workers. Maybe they did replace human workers, maybe they were responsible for keeping more jobs in the US than would have been offshored without them. I dunno.
Those AGV's all had voices, and were polite. If you were detected on or near the (buried) guidepath, the vehicle would slow and politely say, "Excuse me." If you didn't step away, the vehicle would stop and repeat "excuse me" every so often until you did. (It was comical to encounter a stalled machine asking a cardboard box to move.) Once you moved, it would say, "Thank you" and proceed on its way. Upon arriving at a destination where it expected human interaction, it would stop and say, "Hello."
We built AGV's that could open and close doors, ride elevators, and accept their marching orders via wireless LAN or manual entry. The more complex installations had central controllers that could dispatch a vehicle from anywhere in the facility to anywhere else, tell it what to do at each stop along the way, route them on alternate paths to avoid congestion, etc. They were adept at avoiding collisions with other vehicles, and taking themselves out of service as they neared battery depletion -- when they'd seek an opportunity charger and put themselves on charge. Fun stuff.
The mail delivery vehicle in our factory received far less maintenance than it ought to have, and sometimes wandered into a wall, where it would patiently ask, "excuse me", until it was rescued. So I named it Harvey (because it was a Wallbanger). One of our more powerful machines, during prototype testing, moved Harvey's favorite wall by several inches -- I wonder if they were involved in some kind of conspiracy.
That company, Apogee Robotics, ceased operations ten years ago and certainly wasn't without competition. This stuff ain't news!
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
I can't wait to see what phrase gets hacked into the voice processsor to replace this informative gem.
"Hey, check out my package."
"Somebody order a pizza?"
"Does this smell funny to you?"
"I swear to god, it was like that when I got it."
And my personal favorite:
"Hey, what'll you give me for this crap?"
normal(adj)- people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots [DECS]
I've always thought a good application of microsurgical robotics would be internet-based multi-surgeon environments. :)
I would think having 5 or 6 neurosurgeons working simultaneously could acheive rather extrordianry things. Say, reattachment of much beloved body parts (that's always been my favorite sugical application).
Or, multi-surgeon environments could simply make lenghty operations much more speedy (getting a surgery done as soon as safely possible is certainly benificial in most situations).
Come to think of it, why stop at 5 sugeons? make it a 64 surgeon server. I'm sure the insurance companies will love footing the bill for 64 neurosurgeons
Just make sure your hospital has installed punk-buster.
DEYTOOKOURJOBS!!!!
/.er, but I couldn't find it to site)
(blatantly ripped-off of another
put the what in the where?
Link to the scotsman article.
I wouldn't mind having a god-dammed standardized patient chart that's entered and updated electronically (with paper backups, of course) with all the relevant information I need. This would come in pretty fucking handy when I'm trying to fill out a PCR in the back of a bouncing ambulance with a ballpoint pen, which is really a CYA document in any case- so I have to give all the relevant information to the doctor or MedCom verbally, which is like a game of telephone in the third grade.
This would also come in handy because even if the nursing homes that I routinely take sick, dead or dying people out of (no negligence here, folks- it's a nursing home of old people- old people get sick) have a nicely printed computer-stored patient history and drug report, they're all in different formats- dosen't sound like much, but when the paramedic is asking what drugs the patient is on, and you're flipping through a seven or eight page patient history, a standard patient history report might be nice.
From the movie "I, Robot" starring Will Smith.
Robots cannot harm humans.
DUN DUN DA!
Maybe it is - today, but I'm skeptical.
In the Spring of 1980 I received a phone call from a friend of mine. His wife was a US Army officer, in hospital on one of the largest Army bases in the USA. She had developed complications following the birth of their first child in that hospital.
My friend had not been present when his wife "took a turn for the worse." When he was next in the hospital, staff members described her symptoms, indicating that they did not know what had happenned nor what to do about them.
The next day he called me and told me what had happenned. When we got off the phone, I immediately called a nurse I knew who was working on an isolated Reserve in Northern Ontario. She knew exactly what had happenned to my friend's wife. She knew exactly what should have been done to keep the situation from becoming serious. She also knew that it was too late to do anything - that my friend was looking at the live body of his wife, who no longer had a functional brain. And that the body would be dead within a week.
The problem: micro-embolisms - one of the most common post partum complications.
So much for "military medicine seems to be quite a few years ahead of times."
...I'd ask, "Who goes there? Friend or Enema?"
thats right, that satelite dish that keeps popping outa your butt was left there by a robotic nurse/overlord...
select * from Washington DC where clue > 0 || 0 ROWS RETURNED
Soon robots similar to this one will be in more places and become smarter and smarter. I work in a automation factory and get to see large stationary Fanuc robots in action. These thing could rip your arms off and not miss a line of programming. In 10 years, larger and smarter robots will be capable of waling with lege like Aismo, navigating with systems developed from all the autonamous navigation contests and have the strength of large factory robots. These things are scarry, and i just wanted to post my opinion
Oh, yeah. I can just see the original thinkers at Hollywood, Inc. making a movie about these. Robots, designed to serve and help mankind, a minor flaw,
There was a short story I remember reading (but completely lost the name of the author/title), which feature a man who was the last human being on Earth. Something on the lines of cryogenic storage is used to store people with terminal illnesses until they can be cured. During this time of his storage, the entire human population declines, with robots replacing much of the manual work. By this time the entire human population has gone, the entire planet is run by machines which give themselves the purpose of working on curing the remaining humans of their terminal illneses, but the humans die from the shock of regaining consciousness and not seeing any other humans around. The last human manages to survive this shock and proceeds to first search the continent, then the planet, then the solar system, then finally the nearest stars in the hope of finding life, all the time while bouncing in and out of cryogenic sleep for the odd million years. By the time the reports from the first exo-solar planets have been returned, the only life found is slow-moving plant-life, which doesn't impress the guy. After several billion years, when the sun has gone into the red-giant phase, the machines have found intelligent human life, even if they do have a slight greenish hue to their skin. The guy ends up travelling at warp-speed to the new planet to land on a paradise. Well, at least it was a happy ending.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"I despise the tongue and abhore the lips. For lips and tongue can twist truth into lies. I am a child of Karras, and no lips or tongue have i."
*shivers*
I predict this will be the new medical worker joke...
"Wow, I'd let her examine my contents."
"lithium is no longer available on credit"?
In a push to lower costs and free up workers for more critical tasks, hospital officials are turning more and more to robots like TUG to ply their hallways.
I wonder what the unions will have to say about this? More and more they're dictating the overall operating terms of large organizations. Anything which reduces their impact must be bad.....
Saw a robot courier in '93 or '94 (don't remember exactly when). Was at some large corporation. Pretty much followed a stripe on the floor and stopped whenever someone got close. As I recall, it could handle the elevators. Seemed pretty cool to a kid back then. Not sure it's slashdot-worthy a decade later.
Robotic nurses make better lovers, eh?
The hacking is fun, a combo of real time control and game programming, and it's gratifying to be involved in software work that is more beneficial to humanity than the usual "moving bits from here to there."
I bet all the protologists in the ENTIRE WORLD can't wait to be replaced by robots.
/insert additional joke about working with assholes all day long
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
There are actually quite a few...
Here is one:
http://www.pyxis.com/products/helpmate.asp
It is kinda cool to see them roaming around the building. They are used for delivery of medicine to different areas.
They are programmed with a floor plan of the hospital, but do some of their own pathfinding.
They have a little remote for opening doors and operating elevators. They can use 802.11b and other wireless for network. It is really a neat product, but in a way in its infancy.
Disclaimer:
I work for Cardinal Health and we do Automation and Information systems products including the robot in the above (Pyxis is a wholly owned subsidiary).
-A
I am currently working on a system that will auto fill meds instead of having nurses/staff with access to bulk supplies...this cuts theft down to the bone...however the number one obsticle is not the tech it's getting staff to use it properly which only a couple of mins of use show it's nearly impossible to steal meds..thus is the problem the staff will create "User" issues and the machines/tech will get a bad reputation and the facilies will then bail on the project...successfully saving their supply chains...
Geeze I hate theives...sorry for the gripe.
Their flaw: they could be stymied by standing in their way and refusing to move, which made them of limited use in pediatrics because the kids kept harassing the robots.
Damn, just wait until that building gets a "restricted" floor and people start hitching rides with the mulebot.
Betcha the little guy's priority drops faster than a plummeting hospital elevator (think Resident Evil).
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Just make sure Will Smith isn't a patient.
Dr. Hawking's original synthesizer was an off-the-shelf module. Much of the hardware was customized, but not the voice. Same voice shows up all over the place.
Later, after voice customization became less freakishly expensive, he was asked whether he wanted to change it. He said no, because he and his family and colleagues had come to identify with that voice, and a change would be very difficult.
And he's never changed since.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Just retrofit a narrow robot sized elevator system, and/or a network of passageways they can use independant of hallways for them to use, which could increase their efficiency several fold (and possibly cost just slightly more than they save in manhours).
In older hospitals, they used/use dumb waiter systems. A retrofit of those would be far less expensive.
Another thought that crossed my mind, is that perhaps the bots are being used improperly. They do not require a floor to travel, that is a human need. They could run along the walls, or even the ceilings, without any slowdowns due to sharing the space with us gravity dependant beings.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
The hospital my roomate works in has one of these. Its name is Sarah Tonin. It is damned money pit. For one, the thing is slow. Very Slow. It creeps up and down the hallways and when it requested the elevator, it blocks it for use by anyone else. Second, the thing is consistently broken. It spends more time in repairs than it does making rounds. All of this for a flat annual lease whose price is somewhat higher than the salary of the entry level support staff position the thing replaced. There is no way the thing is cost effective, and one of the hospital administrators admitted as much to me at party once. The robot is not about cost effectiveness or usefulness. Its about appearing progressive to patients. The patients see the robot and think "Gee! I must surely get top notch medical care here if they have such hi-tek stuff!" Its an extension of the modern medical fallacy that technology necessarily improves care. The patients would do alot better if the hospital ditched the damned robot and its related support costs and hired an entry level transporter to carry the specimens and a nurse anywhere in the place to lower patient-nurse loads.
That's the nice thing about American's love of their pets. A pool for the medical industry to try all their medicines, procedures, and medical gear on. The penalty if the patient dies is lower. No HMO's to deal with. No absurd insurance premiums.
Who imagined some SA goons sneaking around a hospital, rerouting all the tape to the stairs, along with setting up the bots to play the MP3 of "Terrible Secret of Space"?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I remember that series Magnum Robot Fighter 4000 AD. Not the retelling one but the orginal from the 60's.
Actualy in the movie Runaway with Tom Select and the guy from Kiss. THere was a seen where a guard robot traped one of the character. Some lady. THey just turn on the sprinklers to stun it.
Housekeepin'... Want me fluff pillow?
So true. Trust slash dot to beat the subtlety out of any attempt at humor.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
You'll also free up labor for usage in other things. More nursing care, maybe. More labor will be made available for industry as a whole, maybe allowing a new field that previously couldn't get workers to open up, providing new services, raising the standard of living.
I don't read AC A human right
I went to DC as a high school student in 1978. We got a tour of the department of labor, and they had one of these. It followed a tape in the floor, hailed elevators with an RC signal, and used sonar to avoid running into people and stray junk. It sounds EXACTLY like these units, and pretty much looks the same too. I have a photo but can't find it right now.
So it's getting into very limited commercial use now, some 26 years later.
I'm sorry these are far from cost effective. All hospitals in North America have volunteers at information desks and porters. I should know, I'm one of them ;) What we do is cheaper and more friendly. Screw these job stealers :P
Basically, what you describe is meerly creeping socialism/communism as each new generation "levels" out the wealth more and more until you arrive at absolute communism. The reason is simple, I'm not just arguing slippery slope here.
If you accept the premise that it's ok to redistribute wealth involuntarily through taxes (I'm not just talking about all government spending here, just things that would constitute transfer payments), then where is your logical stopping point?? Perfect equality, anywere in between those two points is simply not sustainable; since anyone that accepts the premise will always want marginally more redistribution of wealth than the current system provides. Of course this wouldn't likely work over a short period of time, as you need successive generations to be raised with ever higher expectations of wealth equality. It's a simple exercise of moving the goalposts, as it were, until an absolute limit is reached. Of course it would be difficult to make it to that point, since the larger the redistributional burden, the lower the overall level of productivity would fall. (as you admit you can't eliminate all incentives, but you seem to be willing to eliminate them for larger and larger groups).
Actually, this is a great parallel to Eldred vs Ashcroft. If congress can retroactively extend copyrights, then you can legitimately argue that the time period for copyrighted works in unlimited and unconstitiutional. (unfortunately the court didn't rule in this manner).
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Stolen from http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/JokEc.html Two stangers, a man and a woman, meet in a cafe, the man asks. "My Dear, would you go to bed with me for a million dollars?" "Well, yes, I guess I would." "How about $100?" "What kind of person do you think I am?" "My Dear, we have already established that. We are merely haggling over the price!" According to Ross Emmet, the story was told by George Bernard Shaw. The man and woman are Winston Churchill and Lady Astor and the incident allegedly did occur.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Over a decade ago, I saw robots (non-humanoid) delivering such things as laundry baskets to various parts of a hospital. The "brain" was some Micro-VAX computers and the robots looked like boxes that followed tracks in the floor.
We are the borg! You will be assimilated! Resistance is futile!
Dont say I didn't warn you...
...about beer delivery robots?
It seems likes Robocop has really bored the people, ..."
it's time to make a new serial for the tv,
"Emergency Room 2, - RoboDoc arrives
i wonder how fast can a robot "learn-it-all" ?
as for human doctors, it takes about 10 years ? or even more?
and then they'll get a unprofitable job at a public hospital
where they have a zero possibility to make a great career whatsoever.
de facto, i'd better trust myself into the hands of
ancient asian healers or western-culture witches than
into the doctors hands we have nowadays. can robots bring
a change in here ?
an excellent AI with nanometer exact slicing'n'cutting
techniques and no drinking'or'drugs problems surely does
look much more promisin' than the doctors now.
as for nurses, i think human nurses will always be better
(more human), especially if they are from the opposite sex;)
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Sweet. Now I can have beer delivery when I'm stuck in a hospital bed!
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Those things were so cool buzzing around the ground under the Storm troopers and Vaders feet carrying out their little unknown tasks. They seemed to be little automatic couriers maybe.
A patent for a Dead Author Generator? I can see the application now...
"This claim covers approaching an author of fictional or non-fictional works published in book, short-story collection, magazine or other form, pointing a pistol, machine-gun, revolver or similar firearm at them and pulling the trigger. Prior art exists for use of a knife or similar weapon (cf Julius Caesar) and burning alive (cf Catholic Church), so these methods are not claimed."
Grab.
Please be careful around the stairwells when these robots are about. Pak Chooie.
If a weak flow of air can be made to switch a stronger one's direction, or switch it on and off, we're ALL screwed. Elaborate networks of air currents, switching one another on and off, could be designed using Boole's rules of logic, and BAM you've got a machine that thinks. Give it two weeks and it will take away all our jobs.
Some may welcome our new pneumatic tube masters, but I say they 4r3 teh 3v1L and must be stopped! If you see a tube and you think there might be compressed air in it, try cutting it open. If anything besides air comes out, slap some duct tape on there real fast. But if only air comes out, you may have just allowed a family to eat dinner. If you're not sure it's air, examine the gas carefully with a lighter.
One thing a lot of people don't know: those DIGSAFE signs in your neighborhood are part of a vast conspiracy, providing the pneumatic tubes an unseen underground haven to raise their young. Get your shovel, seek them out, and hammer nails into them. (But keep a defibrillator handy.)
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Here at work, we have an automatic mailbot that brings around the mail twice a day.
It's loaded up in the mailroom (by humans-we're not that advanced yet), operates the elevators and follows a line of ultraviolet paint around the building. It stops at known locations and waits to be unloaded, it stops it it hits something, and can also be stopped manually.
I named him Marvin
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
This is really, really old news.
''... the University of Virginia Hospital could save as much as $218,000 a year if it replaced 15 human couriers with six HelpMate robots, which would pay for themselves in little over three years.''
I worked at University of Virginia Hospital and we had the robotic couriers in 1993 or 1994. There was no staffing shortage because the robots were replacing minimum wage workers who had no education and no skills. The only skills the couriers needed were the ability to walk, to carry small packages and to not get lost.
There was also a racial issue because all the couriers were African-American. So when they were replaced with robots the hospital fired dozens of African-Americans from minimum wage jobs.
Also the couriers were never trusted with narcotics. Drugs were kept locked and delivered to Nursing units by people from the Pharmacy.
But did you pick up the _Colossus: the Forbin Project_ reference in the article? :-)
That old Magnus I read, I still remember pretty well. Had great noir artwork and a fairly interesting story, at least to a 6 year old. I think Magnus would make a decent subject for a film, but done in a similar style to Bladerunner.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The particular application your speaking of is covered under my filing for the "Dead Script Writer Generator".
Maybe the world is waiting for *you* to write and publish the DTD for medical information.
And they can spell, too!
I would like to have the 10,000 people who can use a device that lets them operate as well as the 100,000 people who don't need it. Afterall with more posible surgeon either there price goes down or the quality goes up (as they become less overworked or the people who are not that great at it do something else.