Digital shift in healthcare and medicines
Did people ever imagine surgery being possible virtually? Or a doctor noting down your heartbeat through the virtual screen? No? Well, it is very much possible now. Just like people play games on PS4 and handle their controls virtually, the same concept has been implemented in the medicinal sector as well.
Robots are being used in the healthcare sector to deliver medicinal facilities and the sector is impounding because of that. In fact, the developers, scientists, and doctors have all collaborated to put robotics to use in the healthcare sector.
Picture courtesy: News Medical
There are a few areas where robotics plays a vital role in transforming the healthcare system:
1. Pharmabotics: the pharmaceutical system solutions are being provided by robots to change the way medicines were delivered in the past. Now, the doctors choose an easy way to deliver the prescriptions and medicines with the pharmaceutics. In fact, they themselves deliver proper health treatment to the patient. They help to identify & select inventories in a flash.
2. AI-powered treatment: artificial intelligence has transformed in leaps & bounds, making diagnosis much easier. Robots and AI-powered systems could be used to detect the person and diagnose their disease. This screening of patients and detection of diseases helps to identify the genetic as well as common disorders in patients to treat them well. Not only this, it helps to scan the records of millions of patients to detect the genetic similarities about the risk of having certain diseases, like heart attack, genetic problem, diabetes, and much more.
Picture courtesy: ISRAEL 21c
3. Nursing through robots: they do not take place of the human nurses but instead, assist them in their day-to-day tasks. Heavy tasks like moving patients, delivering medicines, taking prescriptions, monitoring health to give treatment, are the tasks that are performed by robotic nurses. It saves a lot of time for the actual nurses to give more attention to their patients.
4. Virtual surgery with robots: this is the most widespread and common use of robots, robots- assisted surgery. Like the actual surgery, where the surgeon controls the tools to instruct the robot to perform surgery on the patient and do incisions & cuts. This saves him from a lot of pain like heavy bleeding, intrusion, and the chances of failure.
5. Specific operation: various companies are using robotics for special surgeries or operations like a heart transplant, knee replacement, kidney transplant, bone marrow transplant. These robots are only designed for that one single task and thus, are very precise. They cannot be used for any other purpose though.
6. Prosthetics: there has been an addition of new structure and control systems in prostheses. Robotic limbs and robotic exoskeletons are used to avoid malformations, assist paralyzed patients and provide bionic skin & neural systems.
Picture courtesy: WINDU
7. Endoscopy: biopsy or cauterizing a bleeding blood vessel could be performed by these robots, which are in progress to be made. Not only this but microbots may be deployed into the blood vessels to perform acute therapy such as radiation or medication to a specific place. This could be very helpful in removing cancer or tumor. Another interesting thing is the robotic endoscopic capsules. The patient can swallow and digest these. In turn, they will diagnose the digestive system, gather the required information, and send the data back to the doctor.
The only challenge lies in the training and costing of these systems. Once these challenges are met properly, the medical sector will see an evolution along with the economic sector.