Robots with good bedside manners, and par 3 handicaps?

Citation

Loughlin, C. (2001), "Robots with good bedside manners, and par 3 handicaps?", Industrial Robot, Vol. 28 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2001.04928eaa.001

Robots with good bedside manners, and par 3 handicaps?

Robots with good bedside manners, and par 3 handicaps?

If 25 years ago you were watching a Unimate 4000 spot welding a GM car and someone had told you that in the future robots would be used for human surgery, you would probably not have taken them seriously. You would have been in good company.

Although not yet quite the norm, robotic surgery is now at least commonplace and I would not be at all surprised if in a few years time we hear of hospitals being sued for negligence because a robot was not used in a surgical operation.

Our viewpoint and many of the other articles and papers in this issue describe what can and cannot be done at the moment regarding computer-assisted surgery (CAS) and look ahead to 2010. Of course robots only do what they are told to do, and behind every surgical robot there will be a human surgeon or nurse in control, or at least overseeing what is going on.

I am sure that most people will be concerned about what happens if something goes wrong. Mistakes will always happen, however if you consider that surgical robots are (or should be) built with even greater safeguards than industrial robots. And that industrial robots routinely boast 20,000 hours MTBF, then statistically you have got to be better off than with just a human surgeon. Twenty thousand hours between failures equates to about eight years of fault-free operation, which is far more than we can reasonably expect from our medical colleagues. I am still not sure that I would race to the front of the queue for a robot vasectomy, but it is encouraging to know that progress is being made.

Here in the UK we have a chronic shortage of medical personnel. With the election looming in two weeks time (as I write), the politicians of all sides are full of promises to rectify the situation. This is encouraging but the reality is that you cannot simply conjure up an extra 20,000 nurses or 5,000 surgeons from thin air. First they have to be attracted to the profession, and then undergo lengthy training before being let loose on the public. However, you can buy robots more or less off the shelf. If a robot can mean that one nurse and a robot can take the place of two nurses, or if operations can be performed more quickly, or better so that there is less chance of a second operation being needed, then by 2010 we may have the health service that we have come to expect.

At a recent meeting of editors I got talking to Dr Ian Campbell, editor of our sister journal Rapid Prototyping. Apparently there is work under way to produce artificial bones using RP techniques for such applications as hip replacements. These RP bones could be used to replace diseased or badly fractured bone structures. So someone coming in for surgery could be CAT scanned to determine the profile of the damaged bones. This profile could then be edited in a CAD system to (for example) determine what the bone looked like before fracture, and finally the button pressed on the RP system with a new femur following a few hours later.

This all sounded like an excellent idea, but described a situation that made me think "I wouldn't start from here". Rather than scan someone after an accident or after disease has set in, why not scan them while they are healthy? Soldiers, racing car drivers, skiers and anyone else pre-disposed towards bone breakages could be routinely scanned so that up-to-date 3D CAD images were on file for use as necessary. In fact it probably would not do much harm if the rest of us got scanned about every five years as well.

Joe Engelberger retires

The news that Joe Engelberger has retired comes as sad news. I first met Joe at the9th ISIR in Washington DC in 1979. As a humble student I gatecrashed a cocktail party and was introduced to Joe by my tutorAlan Pugh. On that occasion and over the years that have followed, Joe has been a constant source of inspiration. His contributions at conferences have been profound, always asking the incisive questions and giving freely of his wide-ranging and essentially practical knowledge and experiences.

Joe is widely known as the "father of Robotics" but this encompasses two very different children. He founded Unimation and through it the billion dollar industrial robot industry; then, as if this was not enough, he went on to pioneer the still fledgling service robot industry, one section of which is covered in this issue.

Always a leader, he has found himself in recent years to be too far ahead of his time and has been frustrated by the reluctance of global companies to invest in the development of health-care robots for assisting the disabled or infirm, while at the same time rushing to develop sophisticated and expensive robot toys.

Joe has shown the way and thrown down challenges for the robot community. It is now up to others to carry his work forward.

During his long involvement with our journal he has always been very generous with his time as both an author and as a member of our editorial advisory board. I am very grateful for his support and friendship over the years and wish him a long and healthy retirement.

Clive Loughlin