Longevity science

As smart as they are, doctors can’t compete with the volume of knowledge that a robot can retain. In an effort to join the best of both worlds – human experience with robotic data – a number of companies are developing telemedicine robots that not only allow doctors to reach out to patients miles or continents away, but can offer immediate information and advice that draws from volumes of medical research and case studies.

In January the FDA approved the telepresence platform RP-Vita, developed by iRobot and InTouch Health. Now seven hospitals across North America have enlisted the services of RP-Vita, bringing us one step closer to robotics-augmented healthcare.

General Electric is trying to streamline surgical tool care in hospitals by taking humans out of the equation and letting a robot do the dirty work.

An infection occurs in 1 to 3 surgery patients out of a hundred. While efforts are constant to minimize surgical site infections – improved operating room ventilation, improved sterilization methods, the use of antimicrobials – they are still the most common type of healthcare-associated infections, accounting for approximately 31 percent of infections contracted by hospitalized patients.

It’s a staggering modern-day irony that the most common complication for hospital patients is acquiring an infection during their visit, affecting 1 in 20 patients in the US. It’s a problem estimated to cause millions of infections with 100,000 or so leading to death per year and a whopping $45 billion annually in hospital costs. If this isn’t bad enough, the tragedies from deadly superbugs within healthcare facilities are on the rise and will likely continue as the last lines of antibiotics fail without any new drugs moving fast enough up the pipeline to help.

Fortunately, an alternative to medication promises to vastly improve the disinfection of hospital rooms, thanks to a UV light-emitting robot from Xenex Healthcare.

Remote monitoring of intensive care patients - a strategy to maximize scarce medical expertise - can cost hospitals anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 per bed in the first year.

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Right now about 10 percent of ICU beds in the US are monitored in part from an off-hospital site. And the number of sites using remote monitoring are on the rise, increasing exponentially over the past 5 to 7 years.

Tele-ICU monitoring involves satellite-linked video and communications links to electronic records so that the distant intensivists – doctors that specialize in intensive care – can watch over the patient in real-time, 24 hours a day. A video camera operates on-demand to observe the patient and communicate with them via a microphone and speakers. Through this two-way communication tele-intensivists can aid local intensivists by helping to enforce the patient’s daily goals, review their performance with them and respond to alarms if the local doctor has been called away.

Presently, when an operation is going to be performed at a hospital, people first locate all the instruments that the surgeon will require, inspect them, arrange them on a tray, sterilize them, and then deliver them to the operating room. According to General Electric’s GE Global Research division, however, robots could do all of those things better. To that end, the group has recently partnered with GE Healthcare and the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs, in a US$2.5 million two-year project to develop just such robots.