When thinking about a hospital, most worry about blood, needles, and complicated machinery. The thought of machines that make you comfortable seems like a pipe dream, but in reality, it is possible. Robots are becoming common in most hospitals and are in use in most hospital departments. Some robots help children feel safe and comfortable before surgeries, while others operate.
Table of Contents
1. Robots in Surgery
Robots help by performing surgery or assisting doctors in performing operations. These robots make it easier for the doctor to see inside the patient’s body and do repairs faster than any human hand. Robotic surgery is precise, and the robotic arm in medical robots is nothing like the industrial robotic arm, which requires precision but on a different level.
Robotic surgery is in high demand, with most patients demanding the latest innovations. Three types of robots that help surgeons in the medical sector:
- Autonomous systems that need to be programmed
- Dependent systems where the surgeon must control them throughout
- Shared control systems which are a combination of autonomous and dependent systems
2. Robots in Recovery and Infection Reduction
Robot surgeons have more benefits in comparison to the more conventional methods. Robotic surgery has made strides in surgeries such as kidney surgeries. It allows doctors to do formerly invasive surgeries via a less invasive procedure. Robots help:
- Surgeons remove small parts of an organ, leaving the rest of the organs to function as usual
- Surgeons make a small cut, which reduces the amount of pain on the patient, fewer chances of infection, and less blood loss.
- Instead of patients spending a week in the hospital, the stay is reduced to one or two days
3. Robots Helping Children
Some robots are used to help children before major surgery and after surgery to help them recover. Hospital robots help to alleviate these fears, hang out with the children in the waiting room, and accompany them to different procedures. The children are fascinated by robots and forget all about the procedures. The MIT Personal Robotics Group developed Huggable, which is a robotic teddy bear that talks. Huggable comes with over 1500 sensors, microphones, speakers, and video cameras.
4. Robots Bond with Family and Friends
While robots like Huggable help children in facing their fears, other robots help children to communicate with family members, doctors, teachers, and friends. VGo Communications created a robot that allows video communication as well as following the patients around. The VGo robots help kids in:
- Letting specialist doctors check-in
- Enables parents and friends to call the recovering children
- Broadcasting lessons from school for the recovering child
- Tailing the child to class and back home and to monitor their state of health
This robot provides emotional support via calls from the child’s family members and allows the sick child to get back to the routine as soon as possible.
5. Robots and the Elderly
The elderly population is increasing, and more people are checking into hospices or assisted living facilities for the limitations of their medical and physical needs. This puts pressure on the medical sector to provide proper care for the elderly, and robots are helping in a big way.
Developers are creating robots, which are more personable and act like companions. These robots can, for example, dance and play games like trivia games with the elderly in their homes. This allows the elderly to form an emotional bond with the machine as well as providing entertainment.
6. Janitorial Robots
Robots can work as cleaning robots that can make their way around the hospital and gurneys, people, and carts. Before such robots existed, employees would spend as many as eight hours cleaning the lobby and corridors and only covering 80% of the hospital per shift. Now, robots provide janitors with almost 3,000 hours per year to do other things. The same cleaning robots entertain children in the pediatric wards
Conclusion
Robots are the future, and the future is here with us. Robots will soon be in use in all sectors, and developers have developed robots that help doctors to perform surgeries, calm children, and their families.
