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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!"
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.
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.
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
They have been doing this kind of stuff, with heavy loads in automated factories and warehouses. What is new?
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
>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.
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.
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
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.
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]
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.
No sexual harassment lawsuits
No labor strikes
No complaints from handling things that smell bad
No danger from needlesticks or infections
Less possibility of contamination from outside sources or recontamination from things like cell phones
Easier to sterilize than live personel
More privacy
Unfortunatly, robots have been known to beat up old people and steal their medicine. And once they have you, you can't get away because robots are very strong. Fortunatly, they're coming out with insurance for people who are worried that they might become the victim of robots.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
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
Pneumatic tubes would probably work better. If you REALLY want a robot, the robot could do the routing.
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.
>> 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
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'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
Um, I'm not sure why this would be modded offtopic. I'm a doctor and work in hospitals quite a bit. This is a real problem. The human couriers are often paid little so competence is not the norm for many of these workers. There are often long delays gettin meds up to the floors as a result. Also, drug abuse or selling does occur among the staff and MDs despite many obsticals. Obviously, a robot has no interest in taking drugs for its own purposes so this is clearly a real advantange.
:)
We have one of these things in one of the hospitals I work in routinely. So far its done a good job. I haven't heard any complaints yet. Plus, its surprisingly entertaining to jump back and forth in its path forcing it to try and find a route around you. this doesn't help expediency however
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
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.
...I'd ask, "Who goes there? Friend or Enema?"
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 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
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.
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.
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?