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The Future of Health Care: Part 3 (Robotics)

Posted on Apr 21, 2008 - 02:43 PM

Paul Saffo recently gave a talk to the Long Now Foundation entitled: ”Secret’s to effective forecasting.’ In it, Saffo argued that “inflection points are tiptoeing past us all the time.” To make his point, he used the example of how no robotic cars finished the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004, but all 23 cars started and finished the race just a year later. (For readers interested in a more in-depth look at this exponential-like progress, I’d recommend this old post).

Saffo went on to advise forecasters to look for things that don’t fit. Using the earlier example, he noted how at the same time robotic cars were achieving their extraordinary progress; there was a massive 108 car pile-up of “human-driven” automobiles on a highway in California. Saffo’s point was that the two events point to a possible future scenario whereby robotic-driven cars become more feasible.

Well, I recently had a similar experience but instead of noting the progress in robotic cars, I have witnessed a flurry of articles documenting the amazing amount of progress being made in the field of surgical robots, and this progress juxtapositions nicely against the news suggesting that there is a growing shortage of trained health care professionals to serve America’s growing geriatric populations.

For example, this article discusses how doctors in France are now using a robotic anesthetist; and heart surgery will soon be quicker, cheaper, safer and more effective thanks to ”eye-controlled robots” and ”snake-like robots.” Longer-term, due to advances in accuracy, robots might even be able to conduct neurosurgery.

To understand robotics potential in the health care sector I would invite readers to consider the extraordinary progress Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci surgical robots have made in the field of prostatectomies. In 2005, the company’s robots performed 1% of all prostatectomies. In 2007, they performed over 50%. More important, patients who were operated on by the da Vinci robot were released from the hospital in a day or two—as compared to a week for those who had traditional surgery.

The advance of robotic surgeries will likely continue to grow for two reasons. First, advances in haptic technology will continue to improve both how surgeons can “feel” and manipulate surgical robots; and, as the Internet and Internet2 continue to improve in terms of the amount of digital information that they can reliably transmit, the possibility for conducting tele-surgery with robots grows more possible. (To this end, the U.S. Army and DARPA are already exploring the feasibility of using robots to perform surgery on the battlefield.)

The health care establishment need not only concern itself with robots for surgeries. There are ample other opportunities for the industry to employ robots. In Colorado, a hospital is now using a robot to mix drugs and in South Korea they are even using robots to help train doctors to deliver babies. (Apparently, South Korea has such a low birth rate that there isn’t an ample supply of real mothers for doctors to learn on the real thing.)

At, at an even more basic level, iRobot’s Roomba and Aethon’s Tug robot can help hospitals keep their facilities cleaner. And longer-term, thanks to advances from Sony and Carnegie Mellon (which are both developing “human-centered robotics") it will eventually be possible for robots to relieve nurses from some the more mundane but essential tasks—such as serving food and conducting routine check-ins.

The bottom-line is that robots are growing more sophisticated and hospitals need to begin developing plans and effective strategies to use them because: 1) robots can do some jobs better, faster, cheaper and more safely than humans; 2) in some cases, hospitals may not have any choice but to use robots because there won’t be enough trained professionals to deal with the growing number of elderly patients who need assistance.

Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future trends, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and associations.

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