IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2011 - 99

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Robotic Tools in Hospitals
By Raj Madhavan

ecognizing the labor-intensive
and high employee turnover
rate of sterile processing of
surgical instruments in hospitals, Robotic Systems & Technologies, Inc. (RST), of Bronx, New York,
thought that hospitals can benefit from
lessons learned in manufacturing by
using the tried and true automation
techniques manufacturers employ to
improve efficiency and quality. They
saw a correlation between the repetitive
nature of the sterile process department
and assembly in the world of manufacturing. "When you think about it, the
sterile processing department's tasks for
the most part consist of counting, sorting, inspecting, and processing instruments just like an assembly line," said
Dr. Michael R. Treat, an associate professor of clinical surgery in the College
of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, an attending surgeon at
the New York-Presbyterian Hospital
and founder of Robotic Systems &
Technology, Inc. "Automation can perform these tasks precisely, automatically,
and reliably 24 hours a day and seven
days a week, allowing the administrators
to cut costs, redeploy valuable employees
to more challenging tasks, reduce errors,
and ultimately protect patients."
The company developed the Penelope central supply (PenelopeCS) system
as one of its first robotic tools because it
hopes to be a line of multiple robotic
applications addressing hospital supply
chain needs. The PenelopeCS system
will help automate key functions in the
hospital's sterile supply department.
The system uses RST's bagel software
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2011.940896
Date of publication: 14 April 2011

1070-9932/11/$26.00ª2011 IEEE

and vision system, and
an Adept Viper six-axis
robot from Adept Technology, Inc. The Adept
Viper six-axis robot is
a high-performance articulated robot designed specifically for precision applications.
The robot is fittedwith a magnetic end
effector that allows to pick up the
instruments.
The hospital's sterile processing department has a dirty side where the
instruments are washed down and disinfected and a clean side where they are
prepped, packed, and sterilized in an
autoclave. Working on the clean side of
sterile processing, the PenelopeCS robot
performs counting, sorting, and inspecting instruments. The robot ensures that
each instrument tray sent to the operating
room (OR) contains the correct instruments per the count sheet and that they
are all in good working order. Furthermore, as these instruments are loaded,
PenelopeCS will seamlessly update the
hospital's inventory control system to
provide traceability while reducing the
workload on sterile supply staff.
The company's engineers have developed a robust and sophisticated robotic
control language called bagel. The bagel
software allows the PenelopeCS to formulate high-level goals like unload this
tray of instruments or sort these instruments into stacks and to create a series
of individual steps to accomplish those
goals. If the operator interrupts PenelopeCS in the middle of this process, the
system will remember the preempted
goal and the last completed step so that
it can resume the process after taking
care of the operator's request. RST has
also used bagel to capture an extensive

knowledge base of information about surgical
instruments: their types,
shapes, synonyms, physical characteristics, and so
on. PenelopeCS can use
this knowledge base in conjunction with a proprietary
machine vision system to identify surgical instruments. Third-party identification systems can also be integrated
into the system to use barcodes to
identify individual instruments.
"From our research, we estimate that
hospitals adopting the PenelopeCS system will be able to improve quality, utilize labor more efficiently, and reduce
the costs of processing surgical instrument trays by 23%," said Dr. Michael R.
Treat. "We further predict that hospitals
can expect a return on investment in less
than 18 months." RST is working on
potential hospital robotic applications in
development, including an inspection
application, to make sure that instruments open and close properly, making
sure they are sharp and that they can
cut. Other RST applications include an
OR surgical assistant that can assist the
surgeon by handing him/her the instruments he/she requires by utilizing a
voice-recognition system. Currently,
there are at least 5,800 hospitals in
the United States alone that could
benefit from this technology. A pilot
program is currently in progress at a
prominent New York hospital.
For further information, contact
Robotic Systems & Technologies, Inc.
(RST) at http://www.roboticsystech.
com/ or e-mail mtreat@roboticsystech.
com and Adept Technology, Inc. at
http://www.adept.com or e-mail rush.
laselle@adept.com.

MARCH 2011

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

http://www.roboticsystech http://www.adept.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2011