InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

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.

E-mail
Share

Anybots

Anybots was founded in 2001 and performs robot research and development. Within healthcare, AnyBots provides a type of immersive telepresence, meaning instead of focusing merely on audio and video communications, the AnyBots robot allows for movement controlled by a remote.

"If you're a doctor and have to manage 10 different nursing homes ... the robot can go in, and the doctor can control his movement and direction," said Shahid Shah, health IT analyst. "It can turn on sensors at the control of not the person in the room, but the person who wants to do the communication," he said. Shah said this type of telepresense is impressive since it can move in and out of a specific area and record findings. "In the future, I'd hope to see new sensors shine a beam of light, for example," he said. "Today, it's more about [helping] a human being who's not in a specific location feel like he's there."

Recommended Reading

NASA Mars Mission: No Little Green Men -- Yet

Spy Tech: 10 CIA-Backed Investments

Stolen NASA Laptop Had Unencrypted Employee Data

NASA's IT Future: Robot Telework, 3-D Printing

5 Healthcare Tools to Boost Patient Involvement

To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.