Gripper and robots instead of a white coat?

Moving patients in intensive care wards, transporting food, distributing medication, sorting blood samples: hospital nursing staff have many tasks that are physically demanding or even risky and in any case take up a lot of time – time that is then not available for those in need of care. Already today, robots are able to perform many of these tasks.

“There is great potential for improving the work of specialist personnel by means of automated systems,” says Keibel. “Particularly when it comes to moving materials, hospitals can adopt technologies that are established in industry. When addressing these issues, it makes sense to start with automation, as it works and does not need to be researched or tested first.”

In Keibel’s opinion, automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems or fully autonomous transport robots could take on many tasks: food containers weighing several hundred kilograms due to integrated heating and cooling functions could easily be transported to the wards, or even directly to the patients’ rooms, by robots.

However, tight budgets, structural constraints and lack of awareness of the very existence of such systems often stand in the way of their deployment. Only a few German hospitals already make use of such automated options. At Jena University Hospital, for example, 24 robots in a specially-constructed tunnel system transport meals to the patients.

In order for processes like these to be carried out by robots at all, hospitals need an appropriate infrastructure – and the right mindset. Andreas Keibel and Wilfried von Eiff hope that the coronavirus crisis will have a positive impact in this regard. “Many hospitals have an investment budget, and in the future a higher proportion of this should be invested in innovations,” notes Keibel.

Other systems are already in operation. The Danish company Life Science Robotics, for example, uses the LBR Med from KUKA to support nursing staff with therapeutic measures. In the USA, telepresence robots are enabling remote treatment by physicians, while a disinfection robot from Denmark has been in great demand worldwide since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Moreover, the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) in Prague is using an LBR iiwa to perform COVID-19 tests. This last example, in particular, demonstrates how helpful robots can be in dealing with pandemics – after all, machines are immune to viruses and bacteria.

While there are some scattered innovations – be it with robots or other digital possibilities – there remains plenty of potential overall for automation in hospitals. “We are still a long way from Hospital 4.0,” says Wilfried von Eiff. “We are currently somewhere between stage 1 and stage 2. Some hospitals do not even have full Wi-Fi coverage yet.” He expects an increase in the use of cleaning, transport and nursing robots in the coming years.

In the long term, he has a vision for the “patient room of the future”, where the taps clean themselves, for example, and where patients can operate all devices at the press of a button and act independently with the assistance of robots. “This will certainly not be implemented suddenly and all at once. After all, it will cost a lot of money. But we should approach this scenario step by step,” urges von Eiff. Not least, in order to offer the younger generation an attractive workplace, thereby counteracting the shortage of skilled staff in the healthcare sector.