Robotic science promises to give us some of the most fundamental advances in healthcare that we are likely to see arising out of any technology sector over the next decade. Its use is particularly important for telemedicine because it can enable physicians to extend their ‘physical presence’ to remote locations and even augment their standard capabilities.
A few recent examples include a robotic hand developed at the Michigan State University that allows physicians to perform remote breast cancer checks. The system uses a ‘haptic glove’ to allow the physician to control the robotic hand and even receive back sensory information giving the physician the “artificial sensation of touch”. This system extends the capabilities of the physician with built in ultrasound allowing them to both look at the ultrasound image and feel what they are seeing simultaneously.
Going one step further is InTouch Health with their RP-7 robot system which attempts to re-create the entire presence of the physician through a remote-controlled robot. The robot is untethered so that it could potentially move around an entire hospital freely and has built-in video-conferencing capabilities through a large screen mounted on the robots head, giving the patient the known feeling of seeing and talking to the physician. The system connects to a wide range of medical devices such as electronic stethoscopes, otoscopes, ECG machines, ultrasound and other devices that allow the physician to perform all of the standard checks that they would do in person.
Probably the ultimate example of robotics in healthcare today is the ‘da Vinci Surgical System’ developed by Intuitive Surgical that allows surgeons to remotely perform the most invasive of all medical procedures, open heart surgery. The da Vinci robot system is more ‘sterile, precise and flexible’ than a human hand and with the latest upgrades developed by researchers at Waseda University, can even perform coronary artery bypass surgery on a beating heart , something considered impossible to do by human hand alone.
The future of robotics in healthcare is both bright and fast-paced. Within the next decade, robots will become indispensable tools for advanced telemedicine. They will be commonplace in hospitals, which themselves will form a global grid of telemedicine connections that will allow specialist physicians and surgeons to help patients well beyond the scope of their own hospital and geographic location.
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Alex Savic is the CEO of Alensa AG, a Swiss healtchare company active in the fields of generic medicines and eHealth. Alensa has just launched the NextWidgets platform that allows pharmacies and other health shops to retail their products on the internet. Also, follow him on Twitter!
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