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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!"
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.)
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 :)
You can actually filter that out.
Other cool things would be to use force-feedback combined with imaging technologies so that surgeons could do stuff like make critically sensitive areas seem rigid, like brain tissue or blood vessels around a tumour.
The VR aspects of it too also let you do image and motion scaling as well as work at weird angles, so that certain types of microsurgery become possible, you could sew arteries like pairs of jeans, or operate on a beating heart.
Surgery is particularly a good application for this stuff because it's relatively easy to simulate the surgeon's tools.