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10 Medical Robots That Could Change Healthcare

By Michelle McNickle 12/07/2012 From microbots that scrape plaque from arteries to personal assistant robots that help care for patients, medical robots are transforming the face of healthcare.

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Robotic Therapy

CosmoBot, pictured above, is part of a phenomenon called robotic therapy. Doctors use CosmoBot to enhance the therapy of developmentally disabled children between 5 and 12 years old. Using the robot can make therapy more interesting for children and allows for better success when achieving long-term therapy goals.

The company designed CosmoBot to collect data on a child's performance. This allows therapists to evaluate how successful the therapy is. Similar to CosmoBot are robots mirroring stuffed animals, also used for therapeutic purposes. For example, PARO, which resembles a stuffed toy baby seal, allows patients to have the experience of animal therapy without the problems associated with live animals. AIST, a leading Japanese industrial automation pioneer, developed the PARO robot, which is designed to "express different moods" depending on the patient's interaction with it, and it can learn how to respond to a certain name when called it a number of times.

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