Robotics and Healthcare to bring revolutionary changes and challenges in the future

The coronavirus pandemic has led to unexpected innovations in automation while opening bottlenecks in the implementation of robotic systems in healthcare facilities. They contend that advances in human-robot interaction – such as improving the ability of robots to sense, touch, and decide – will determine whether tomorrow’s robots will help hospitals anticipate the next pandemic.

It may be acknowledged that robots significantly improve patient care and provider safety during COVID-19 by minimizing contact between infected patients and caregivers, reducing the need for personal protective equipment kits, and providing more time to focus on critical tasks. This individually welcomes the benefits that modern technology will provide to the world and how technology can be used to develop adaptive and reliable robots for future infectious diseases.

We already have robots that deliver food and consumables or check a patient’s temperature. We are now talking about much more complex systems – which can perform serious cleaning, perform nursing tasks, and do many things, and not just deliver supplies – and this presents some interesting engineering challenges.

One of the biggest problems is the availability and how quickly a non-expert user can customize the robot. For example, an ICU ventilator bot is designed in a manner that presses or pushes buttons. But some ventilators have knobs, so we need to be able to add modality so that the robot can manipulate knobs as well.

This pandemic demonstrates some of the current limitations of robotic systems operating stably and adapting to challenging, changing environments on a large scale. Robots in busy hospitals must be able to deal with unexpected events and uncertainties. Research should focus on improving the autonomy and training strategies of health robots so that they can perform tasks only with limited supervision.

The most realistic approach to health robots in the near future is shared autonomy, which combines the knowledge of medical professionals with the capabilities of robots. Surviving the pandemic was not easy, and the only reason we survived was the health sector doing the best it could. Healthcare and robotics combined bring a revolutionary change that will not only save more lives but also make tasks easier, faster, and more precise than human intervention.