IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2010 - 27

SEPTEMBER 2010

Western Europe
USA
Japan
India

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Societal Drivers
Numerous societal drivers for improved health care can be
addressed by robotic technology. Improving existing medical
procedures to be less invasive and produce fewer side effects
would result in faster recovery times and improved worker
productivity. Revolutionary efforts to develop new medical
procedures and devices, such as microscale interventions and
smart prostheses, would substantially improve risk-benefit and
cost-benefit ratios. More effective methods of training medical
practitioners would lower the number of medical errors, as
would objective approaches for accountability and certification/
assessment. Ideally, these improvements would also lower

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Application Areas for Medical
and Health-Care Robots
Robots are already beginning to affect medicine (the application of science and technology to treat and prevent injury and
disease) and health care (the availability of treatment and prevention of illness). Telerobotic systems are being used to perform surgery, resulting in shorter recovery times and more
reliable outcomes in some procedures [1]-[3]. Robotic systems are also successfully delivering physical and occupational
therapy [4], [5] and replacing lost limb function [6]. Experiments have also demonstrated that robotic systems can provide
therapy oversight, coaching, and motivation that supplement
human care with little or no supervision by human therapists
and can continue long-term therapy in the home after hospitalization [7]-[11]. Creating a robotic system that mimics biology has been used as a way to study and test how the human
body and brain functions [12]. Furthermore, robots can be
used to acquire data from biological systems with unprecedented accuracy, enabling us to gain quantitative insights into
both physical and social behavior.
The spectrum of robotic system niches in medicine and
health care, thus, spans a wide range of environments (from
the operating room to the family room), user populations
(from the very young to the very old, from the infirm to the
able bodied, from the typically developed to those with physical and/or cognitive deficits), and interaction modalities (from
hands-on surgery to hands-off rehabilitation coaching).

costs to society by decreasing impact on families, caregivers,
and employers.
Population factors related to economics must be considered.
In the United States, more than 15% of the population is uninsured, and many others are underinsured. This prevents individuals from receiving the needed health care, sometimes resulting
in loss of function or even life, and also prevents patients from
seeking preventative or early treatment, resulting in worsening
of subsequent health problems. Access to health care is most
directly related to its affordability. Interactive therapy robots
could reduce the cost of clinical rehabilitative care. The availability of SAR technologies [7] that could provide affordable
in-home systems for motivating and coaching physical and
cognitive exercise would positively impact both prevention and
rehabilitation. Finally, robotics technologies for caretaking of
the elderly can promote aging in place (i.e., at home), delay the
onset of dementia, and provide companionship to mitigate isolation and depression.
Access to health care is also related to location. When disasters strike and result in human injury, distance and unstructured environments are obstacles to providing on-site care and
removing the injured from the scene in both natural disasters
(e.g., earthquakes and hurricanes) and man-made disasters (e.g.,
terrorist attacks). Similar problems occur in the battlefield;
point-of-injury care is needed to save the lives of many military personnel. Some environments, such as space, undersea,
and underground (for mining) are inherently far from medical
personnel. Finally, rural populations can live prohibitively far
from medical centers that provide specialized health care. Robots
can provide access to treatment for people outside populated
areas and in disaster scenarios.
Population factors indicate a growing need for improved
access and quality of health care. Demographic studies show
that many countries will undergo a period of significant population aging over the next several decades. By 2030, the United
States, Europe, and Japan will experience increases of approximately 40, 50, and 100%, respectively, in the number of
elderly, as shown in Figure 1 [14]. The number of people with
an age above 80 will increase by more than 100% across all continents. Advances in medicine have increased the life span; this

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improved health care, the specific capabilities that robotic systems should have to affect health-care scenarios, and the necessary fundamental technological improvements needed to
achieve significant performance gains.
We begin this article by defining application areas and societal drivers for medical and health-care robots. Next, we
briefly describe the motivation for using robots in specific
application areas by highlighting a few examples of the existing
approaches and providing motivating scenarios. Then we
define desired system capabilities to achieve broader, more
successful, and (in some application areas) initial application of
robots in medicine and health care. We conclude with a list of
basic research areas/technologies needed to achieve these
capabilities. The article is based on the outcomes of a U.S.
workshop and associated report titled "A Research Roadmap
for Medical and Health-Care Robotics."

Figure 1. Past and anticipated percentage of the population
above age 65 [14].
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2010