A robot doctor that featured in the hospital drama is not as far-fetched as it seems, writes Karlin Lillington
When a rolling robot doctor appeared in an episode of hospital drama ER last year, it may have seemed one of the whackier moments for the long-running television show.
But in this case, truth was not only stranger than fiction but running well ahead of the script-writers. Far from being a Dalek-like concoction for the small screen, the robot was real - an InTouch Technology RP-6 (remote presence) robot already working in more than a dozen hospitals in the US (the latest version is the RP-7).
The Detroit Medical Center uses 10; the Shawnee Mission Medical Center in Kansas has four; the University of California's Los Angeles intensive care unit has several.
An Emory University medical professor used one to "supervise" an advanced laparoscopic surgery in France while sitting in his office in Atlanta, Georgia. In Hong Kong and Shanghai, Emory University is developing similar training programmes using the robots.
The 200lb, 5ft tall, wheeled robot has a flatscreen monitor for a head, a video camera for eyes and ears, and two antennae. It is controlled by a physician using a joystick to steer it through hospital corridors.
The physician or medical professor's head appears on the screen, enabling nurses, students and patients to interact directly with them.
"Robotics and simulation technology is currently altering how surgeons develop skills and treat patients," says C Daniel Smith, professor of surgery and chief of general and GI surgery at Emory University school of medicine. He is the aforementioned physician who conducted the telerobotic surgical training session in France.
Far from finding the robot eerie or frightening, most patients in a Johns Hopkins University study enjoyed the visits from the "rounding robot". Half said they would prefer a telepresence visit from their own physician via the robot, to a visit from an unknown physician.
Some 57 per cent said they would welcome the telerounds as part of their own healthcare. And 80 per cent felt the robot would help increase accessibility to their doctor.
From a doctor's perspective, the robot enables a physician to view scans and X-rays, interview and observe patients and advise on treatment, without having to get to the hospital - a boon for UCLA's intensive care unit.
Robots are also already at work in the dispensing section of hospital pharmacies.
The medical centre at Cincinnati Children's Hospital has a dispensing robot - the IntelliFill from ForHealth Technologies - that prepares IVs for patients at the rate of 300 syringes an hour.
The robot, which uses several safety-check systems and bar-coding for careful tracking, is faster and more accurate than a human, reducing the chance of human error and reducing costs, the hospital says.
Even more dispensing robots are already roaming autonomously about hospital floors using sensors, sonar or guiding tapes to find their way around. Some are even multilingual.
Robots called the Tug, HelpMate and RoboCart roll around hospitals dispensing medications to nursing stations; the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota uses its RoboCarts to ferry blood samples to labs.
The use of the robots was given a real boost by a US National Academy of Sciences study in 2001, which estimated that 75 per cent of dispensing errors could be eliminated by using robots.
Perhaps the most interesting deployment of these mechanical helpers is predicted in the next decade or two, when robots are expected - quite seriously - to take on carer roles as the developing world's population ages.
"When I'm 85 I think we'll see robotic companions for elderly people," says Candace Sidner, senior research scientist and artificial intelligence expert at Mitsubishi Electric research laboratories in Massachusetts, who spoke about robot communication at a conference at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth recently.
"Most of western Europe and Japan is going to have the problem of having way more older people than younger people to take care of them," she says.
Robots can provide companionship, dispense medications, advise on diet and exercise, and help do basic tasks, according to Honda, developer of a 4ft tall humanoid robot called Asimo.
Asimo - which stands for Advanced Step In Innovative Mobility, but also means "foot movement" in Japanese - is a walking, talking robot able to identify individual people, do some basic tasks and respond to basic commands.
Asimo isn't just for show, although several dozen Asimos worldwide visit elite engineering colleges for demonstrations and for special programmes for schoolchildren (one visited Ireland a few years ago for the Young Scientist competition).
Honda is very seriously looking at a potential market.
Jeffrey Smith, Asimo North American project leader for Honda, says a 4ft tall android is the right size to flip on light switches, move a table out of the way or hand medication to a bed-bound person.
He says that, with a glut of ageing baby-boomers in the future, Honda believes assistive robots will be a viable product - perhaps in as little as a decade - and that most families will eventually own a home-helper robot.
With that endorsement, expect to see Asimo on ER any day now.