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Would You Let a Robot Stick You With a Needle?

Posted by timothy on from the with-pleasure-and-gusto dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum has a story about a robot that uses infra red and ultrasound to image veins, picks the one with best bloodflow, and then sticks a needle in. (video included). Veebot started as an undergrad project and the creators are aiming for better performance than a human phlebotimist before going for clinical trials. Robodracula anyone?"

7 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Why yes, I would. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'll always take a robot over a human when my safety is in question. I want a human involved, but predictable error that can be controlled is far preferable to unknowable error modes of humans.

    1. Re:Why yes, I would. by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      predictable error that can be controlled is far preferable to unknowable error modes of humans.

      This is exactly backwards....a human will be aware enough to never jab the needle all the way through your arm. If there's a bug, the computer will do that happily and quickly.

      Therac-25 is an example of the dangers of improperly tested computers with lethal equipment.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Why yes, I would. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

      Therac-25 is an example of the dangers of improperly tested computers with lethal equipment.

      The Therac-25 was the result of layer after layer of utter incompetence. They assigned a programmer who wasn't qualified to write a javascript button-click handler, to write life-critical sofware. Then no one else even looked at his code. There was no design review, no QA or bug tracking, and very little testing. Even after the defect was reported, there was no review or followup, or realization that it could even be a software problem. But the problem went much deeper. The hardware design was just as defective. There were no interlocks, in either hardware or firmware, to prevent defective software from killing patients. Many books on mission critical embedded system design devote an entire chapter to all the stupid mistakes that made up the Therac-25. If you make a list of the rules of sane system design, the Therac-25 design will have violated nearly every one of them.

    3. Re:Why yes, I would. by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Informative

      a human will be aware enough to never jab the needle all the way through your arm. If there's a bug, the computer will do that happily and quickly.

      And a bit of thought to the mechanical design of the robot will prevent it ever having the physical capability to do that.

      Which oddly enough, is how they've designed the robot in TFA....

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    4. Re:Why yes, I would. by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And the exact same thing could happen to any other completely mechanical device. Unless you wrote the software or were closely involved with the development process, you have no fucking clue as an end user of medical devices if its actually safe to use.

      Yes, its an example of how to do it wrong, but you CAN NOT ignore the fact that IT HAPPENED.

      The example is mentioned not to show how it can be done wrong, but that even in the highly regulated medical industry, where lives are ALWAYS on the line, it slipped right through with a completely improper design and inadequate testing, where as even a 15 year old would be more reliable at noticing the missing filter when reconfiguring the machine more often than the T-25 failed.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    5. Re:Why yes, I would. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And the exact same thing could happen to any other completely mechanical device.

      You design the mechanism so that it is physically impossible for the software to do something dangerous. In the case of Therac-25, there should have been a mechanical interlock that cut power to the radiator when the shield was not in place. In the case of the needle sticking robot, you use an actuator with a stroke of, say, 5mm. Then there there is no way it could "jab through your arm". You also use a weak actuator, that doesn't have enough physical strength to push into bone, even when given full power. You put a spring-loaded (not software controlled) sheath over the needle, so the needle is never exposed unless it is pressed against skin. You design the hardware assuming the software is malicious. You design away any way you can think of for the software to do harm.

      Then you design the software assuming the all the mechanical interlocks have failed, and use sensors to double check everything.

  2. There are good reasons... by sirwired · · Score: 4, Informative

    The skin on the tips of your fingers is both thick and generally well-vascularized, (but not so much that there is any chance of hitting a larger vessel).
    They don't have to pinch your skin to force sufficient blood to the surface to collect. (This causes bruising in people with fragile skin.)
    There is a very high concentration of nerve endings, the pain receptors are not nearly as dense.
    There's no muscle, which is sore for some time when injured.
    It's consistent from person to person; a forearm stick will vary widely depending on the thickness of the skin, fat, and muscle layers. That's not a worry on the fingertip, where everybody will have enough skin that that's the layer they'll always be drawing from.