Collaboration
Introducing Hospital Robots to Help Health Workers and Patients
ITRI teamed up with Taiwan’s China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) to introduce hospital robots to assist in surgical operation, logistics, and environmental cleaning through a three-phase collaboration program. The robotic services including autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and a surgical navigation robotic arm system will be applied in CMUH branches, and are expected to ease the strain on health workers and enhance surgical precision.
In the first stage of the program, AMRs will be deployed in operating rooms, emergency rooms, and isolation wards to provide administrative, logistics, and infection control solutions; meanwhile, robotic arms will assist orthopedic and neurosurgical physicians in locating lesions with improved accuracy. In the second stage, other intelligent technologies will be deployed to more CMUH departments. In the last stage, the robots are planned to be used in the new Taichung Senior Rehabilitation General Hospital to be launched in 2025 to offer long-term care services for the elderly.
“CMUH ranks as the second largest healthcare system nationwide. With Taiwan’s aging population growth and the recent pandemic in mind, CMUH was actively looking for solutions to improve medical efficiency and service quality, and technologies can help,” said ITRI’s Executive Vice President Pei-Zen Chang. “CMUH is ITRI’s first hospital partner to sign an MOU to develop hospital robots. We hope to see more cross-disciplinary research like this flourishing,” he added.
Below are the first two technologies jointly developed by ITRI and CMUH.
Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR)
Without pre-defined courses or marks, the intelligent AMR can calculate the best route and automatically avoid obstacles to complete delivery tasks. It also replenishes a range of supplies and disinfects areas such as the emergency room, operating room, and negative pressure room 24 hours a day. Always on standby, it is best suited for environments that require high-level infection control.
“It will free our staff from highly repetitive tasks like getting wound dressing kits and saline solution that takes them about 250 to 270 rounds per day, allowing them to redirect their focus onto patients,” said CMUH Superintendent Dr. Der-Yang Cho. “We project it to be very helpful in cutting down nurse workload and lowering their injury risks. Other highlights include supply inventory tracking and improved infection control quality.”
The hospital AMR model is tasked to clean hospital wards and deliver drugs, devices, and even patients.
Surgical Navigation Robotic Arm System
ITRI’s spinal surgical navigation system can drive the medical robotic arm to accomplish minimally-invasive surgeries at a neurosurgical level of accuracy. Besides shortening pre-operative time and boosting surgery precision, it also significantly reduces patient radiation exposure. Compared to a traditional surgery that needs more than 200 x-ray images, it only takes two images for the system to navigate and guide the robotic arm. This technology can be used with ITRI’s 3D Printing Biomimetic Materials and Structures for Tissue Integration (BioMS-Ti), a 3D printed bone implant for tissue integration, to speed up post-surgery recovery and reduce hospital stay.
The spinal surgical navigation robotic arm system ensures higher precision and reduces surgical time.