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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!"
Too bad that they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Not mine. I just checked and my Old Glory robot insurance policy is up to date.
Yes, then the roobt detects the hand tremors and removes them, so that the doctor doesn't accidentally slice open an artery or whatever. I *think* it's called the Da Vinci Surgical System.
ResidntGeek
So basically, nothing has changed since Tron?
Wrong movie there, bub. Looker predated Tron by over a year, and it actually FEATURED the trash robots running around. Just watch out for the bad guys with their "invisio-flashy-thingy" guns.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
The arrival of the robotic hospital
They demo'd it at my med school. The guys who tested it were suitably impressed. Buy the stock, folks. (No, I have no connection to them.)
They don't all use tape on the floor. We have one that apparently gets its bearings from radio - there are beacon antennas at the nursing stations and in front of the elevators.
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.
My girlfriend is a RN too. She likes the tech (when it works) because it helps eliminate mistakes. The scanning of wrist bar codes for drugs seems to be helping with that. It's amazing how often the wrong drugs or dosages are given to patients. Especially since nurses are incredibly overworked - they frequently have to work 12+ hours. In some hospitals, if you don't put in the time, they'll fire you. Some how, they're getting around labor laws. And now, hospitals are trying to get foreign workers to become nurses ...I'm going on a rant. I'm stopping.
Are you perhaps thinking of a pyxis machine? [link]http://www.pyxis.com/[/link] The idea is fairly simple. You enter a patient id and you are given drug options. A drawer opens and you count the current amount of items. You take your item out and re-count. done.
1 1ir.pdf[/link]. One of the items it does not cover that Dr. Plummer did was an intercom system. He called the telco and told a sales person what he wanted. The sales person said it couldnt be done. Plummer demanded to speak to an engineer, who also said it could not be done. Dr. Plummer convinced the engineer that it could and will be done. vwala.
t ml[/link] "Mayo Clinic occupies approximately 15 million square feet -- about 2.9 times the size of the Mall of America." hit the site, browse around, be amazed.
Dr. Plummer brought a lot of technology to the health care industry that can be read here [link]http://www.mayo.edu/proceedings/2002/nov/77
The paging sytem at Mayo now is quite efficent. You have a pager, number 11, for when you are away from your desk. Your boss decides he wants to talk to you. He answers the phone and dials 11. Your pager goes off. You pick up the nearest phone and press #11 causing you to be connected to your boss. If you are unable to answer your pager it rolls over to either a pre-defined number or voice mail. Robots arnt the only/most efficent technology used in hospitals.
Anoter fact from [link]http://www.mayoclinic.org/about/rochester.h
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
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.
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
Not to be a jerk but just informative: arthroscopic means you use the camera to look in a joint (arthro like arthritis or what an orthopedic surgeon would do to scope your joint/eg. knee). Laparoscopic is what you meant for looking in the abdomen for the gallbladder. Or thorascopic for chest, etc. Yes, IAAS (surgeon).
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.
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.
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.