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Hospital to use robots for day-to-day tasks

The future is here | June 19th, 2010 by Neeraj Kamdar

The BBC reports that the Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Scotland is getting ready to deploy robots to perform day-to-day tasks such as delivering food, dispensing drugs, carrying clinical waste, cleaning operating theatres etc. The hospital is scheduled to open in August in Larbert, Stirlingshire.

The most interesting aspects of this system are:

• The robots will have their own network of corridors underneath the hospital.
• The staff will have handheld PDAs to summon the robots.
• The robots will have dedicated service lifts by which they will come up, perform their tasks and go back.
• The robots will follow pre-programmed routes using a series of laser beams that will guide them.
• Computers on the robots along with sensors will enable the robots to open doors as well as stop if anything or anyone is in their way.
• Infections can be controlled by robots doing either clean jobs or dirty jobs. Some robots will be dedicated to dirty tasks such as clearing dirty linen and clinical waste and some will be dedicated to clean tasks such as bring meals. They will even have separate lifts to prevent them crossing paths.
• The pharmacy will be automated, with robots dispensing, labelling and packaging drugs.

Humans, don’t worry. Your jobs will not be replaced by robots. Hospital managers say that this will allow human workers to spend more time with patients and at the very least humans will be needed to be on standby incase robots go down.

Questions that popped up in my mind – I hope they have been tested really well. Are they prone to viruses? What security measures have been put in place to prevent software sabotage?

Problems will arise. No software is bug-free. But this is definitely the future. We just have to respond efficiently and learn from our mistakes (or the robot’s mistakes) quickly.

Tags: hostpitals, robots, scotland