Sci-Fi Surgery On Exhibit: 7 Medical Robots That May Make You Reconsider Your Need For Medical Attention
October 2, 2009
Sci-Fi Surgery On Exhibit: 7 Medical Robots That May Make You Reconsider Your Need For Medical Attention
October 2, 2009
In Cisco deal, Tandberg does just fine
On the face of it, Cisco’s bid to purchase Norwegian videoconferencing rival Tandberg for $2.98 billion looks like a crushing victory for Cisco. After all, CEO John Chambers has been a tireless advocate for Cisco’s version of the technology, using it to slash his travel budget and pitch a new way to work – and he’s nabbing Tandberg for a mere 11% premium over Wednesday closing stock price. (Tandberg trades on the Oslo Stock Exchange.)
Surely Tandberg must have seen the growing threat from Cisco (CSCO), and wilted under pressure?
Not exactly. Read the fine print, and this looks like a good deal for Tandberg for three reasons.
First, Tandberg turned down a private equity takeover bid a year ago, and its stock price has nearly doubled since then – so this 11% premium is actually a nice chunk of change.
Second, Cisco typically likes to buy 100-person Silicon Valley startups for about $100 million. When the notoriously frugal Chambers is willing to dish out nearly $3 billion for Tandberg’s 1,500 people – his first time buying a public company based outside the U.S. – it means he decided this deal was worth working outside Cisco’s well-worn acquisition playbook.
Third, Tandberg CEO Fredrik Halvorsen will take over Cisco’s videoconferencing efforts, reporting to Marthin de Beer, senior vice president of the Emerging Technologies Group. That shows Cisco respects Halvorsen’s track record of double-digit annual revenue growth, and suggests the networking giant could move toward Tandberg’s embrace of open standards for videoconferencing.
Make no mistake – this is a good deal for Cisco, too. The Tandberg acquisition transforms the company from a niche player in six-figure telepresence rooms into the number-one player in videoconferencing, with a product for every budget. It also creates new headaches for competitors like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Microsoft (MSFT) and Polycom (PLCM), who will now face a bigger foe with deep pockets.
Source: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/01/in-cisco-deal-tandberg-does-just-fine/
September 29, 2009
Polycom Boosts Telehealth, Telemedicine Programs for Healthcare Groups
By Amy Tierney
With the growing demand of mobile solutions, healthcare companies are turning to telepresence solutions to offer patient care from miles away.
Polycom, a provider of telepresence, video and voice communication solutions, is using its telehealth and telemedicine networks to help hospitals and other healthcare organizationsextend visual communication capabilities outside of their private networks.
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“Demand for telehealth programs is exploding because it addresses one of the fundamental challenges facing the healthcare industry today, which is that there are not enough doctors and they are unevenly distributed,” said Dr. Deborah Jeffries, director of healthcare markets,Polycom ( News – Alert), in a statement. “Polycom telehealth solutions address this issue by bringing physicians to the point of care, regardless of their location.”
The company recently announced it’s using an enhanced solution to Expand telehealth Initiatives to additional hospitals, community health clinics and doctors.
The enhance solution includes Polycom Converged Management Application, a video network management system, Polycom CMA Desktop, a scalable, cost-effective solution for PC-based desktop video conferencing, and the Polycom Video Border Proxy line of network-aware firewall traversal systems, which work with existing firewall infrastructure to allow secure video calling between networks.
The standards-based offering delivers high-quality visual communication capabilities, and lets users share video, audio and content from medical devices. It also features interoperability with other standards-based telehealth, telepresence and video conferencing solutions.
Organizations Ontario Telemedicine Network are benefiting from the new solution. OTN, a service provider for hospitals and health clinics throughout the Ontario province, expanded its existing capabilities to address growing demand. OTN operates one of the largest, most active telehealth networks in the world. The network includes more than 1,500 video systems. The group estimates it facilitated more than 53,000 clinical consultations and more than 12,000 education and training events in 2008.
“Demand for telehealth services in Ontario is outstripping supply even with our growth rates of between 20 (percent) to 40 percent a year,” said Ron Riesenbach, vice president of emerging business, OTN, in a statement. “There are approximately 150,000 healthcare professionals in the province. We service several thousand of them, but we have many more thousands yet to connect. The Polycom solution helps address the scalability, cost and network issues by allowing us to more easily provision secure, high-quality personal telehealth capabilities to users and clinics outside of our VPN overlay network. With this new technology, we are starting to enable new sites with telehealth capabilities in less time, and at a reduced cost.”
Polycom’s solution also features unique quality of service technology that offers a consistent, high-quality experience for users on public networks that can experience network congestion and packet loss. Polycom Lost Packet Recovery’s error correction technology helps minimize the impact of network congestion and packet loss.
OTN plans to connect 300 users with the new Polycom solution, and expects to add thousands of additional sites next year, company officials said. Officials said the expanded network will also broaden telehealth applications.
Telehealth is now used for real-time consultations between specialists at larger hospitals and patients at their community health centers. For instance, a telestroke program connects stroke neurologists to emergency rooms to help evaluate time-critical patient needs. Telehealth is also used in mental health and treatment options and to enhance medical care in correctional facilities. Healthcare practitioners and health system professionals also use the OTN network to access an active program of educational and administrative events, officials said.
OTN is using the Polycom CMA Desktop as part of a key component of its pandemic response planning for the current H1N1 virus. The OTN telehealth capabilities help healthcare happen across distances, which can boost response times and protecting doctors from infection.
“There are numerous potential applications for telehealth and interest is growing because it delivers significant, tangible benefits, including improving access to quality care, improving efficiency and the distribution of clinical expertise, enhancing education and training, and helping lower overall healthcare costs,” Jeffries said.
Amy Tierney is a Web editor for TMCnet, covering unified communications, telepresence, IP communications industry trends and mobile technologies. To read more of Amy’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Source: http://hdvoice.tmcnet.com/topics/unified-communications/articles/65182-polycom-boosts-telehealth-telemedicine-programs-healthcare-groups.htm
September 29, 2009
Hoag Hospital Foundation – The Future of Health Care – InTouch Health Technologies
I received an email today from the foundation about their upcoming event and thought this was worth passing along for others to view as well. This 
is an annual event that also helps fund and support nursing education at the hospital. You can’t help but notice the picture of the robot on the brochure, right? If you read this blog, I have written frequently about the “Robo-doc” as they are used in many facilities today, to include UCLA, and recently even helped get a hospital in Fountain Valley, accredited as a stroke center.
Robots at Work in Orange County Hospitals – California
The CEO of InTouch Technologies, who manufactures the robots is the guest speaker at the event, so you can see the hospital is making great strides to keep their nursing community updated on how healthcare is changing today. Under the related reading section below I have included some prior posts that include videos on how the robot is used and functions today, including one from Johns Hopkins. Hoag Hospital is also very active in utilizing the Stark laws to help subsidize the cost of electronic records for their doctors who are on staff there and I believe the amount graduates as high as a 60% assistance rate, based on an article posted last year. BD
Hoag Hospital Selects eClinicalWorks for Its …
Source: http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2009/09/hoag-hospital-foundation-future-of.html
September 29, 2009
International Telestroke Network : Medting Blog
Few days ago (September 4th) we had the opportunitty to learn from Dr. Demaerschalk about Telestroke and Telemedicine networks in a event in Palma de Mallorca (SPAIN).
He also presented some results and demo about the First International Telestroke Network, between Mayo Clinic and H. Due Grace Hospital in Canada. The Ministry of Health in Spain was very interested in supporting the network.
You can see the initial slides of the proposal here:
Medting International Telestroke Network
View more presentations from mcabrer.
You can also see Dr. Demaerschalk presentation of the Proof of Concept Telestroke Network in next video. (Visit link below.)
In this last video, Dr. Demaerschalk is making the demo of the workflow and dialogue between the referral doctor and the specialists through Medting. (Visit link below.)
Source: http://blog.medting.com/2009/09/24/international-telestroke-network/
September 25, 2009
Osceola Regional Medical Center recognized for heart patient care
By MICHAEL W. FREEMAN
THE REPORTER EDITOR
Published: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 3:20 p.m.
KISSIMMEE — Osceola Regional Medical Center, which is building a hospital in fast-growing Poinciana, just got recognized in a recent issue of U.S. News & World Report for its work with heart and stroke patients.
The medical center in Kissimmee got recognized for achievement in using evidence-based guidelines through the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines program. That’s a hospital-based quality-improvement program designed to ensure that medical centers consistently treat and care for cardiac and stroke patients with the most up-to-date guidelines and recommendations. The program addresses coronary artery disease, heart failure and stroke.
Currently, there are an estimated 1,450 hospitals participating in this program, and Osceola Regional Medical Center and 569 others were featured in a July 28 advertisement in the “America’s Best Hospitals” issue of U.S. News & World Report.
GWTG recognized the hospitals that had won the Silver Performance Achievement Award, given for achievement in coronary artery disease, stroke and/or heart failure treatment.
Timothy Cook, CEO of Osceola Regional Medical Center, issued a statement noting that “We are proud that the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association have chosen the ‘America’s Best Hospitals’ issue of U.S. News & World Report to recognize Osceola Regional Medical Center for our achievements in their Get With The Guidelines program.”
The program, he added, “gives our professionals the tools and reports they need to effectively treat our stroke patients.”
The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s advertisement recognized Osceola Regional Medical Center’s commitment and success in performance achievement. Hospitals are recognized in each category where they achieved at least an 85 percent compliance rate with the Get With The Guidelines measures. Those hospitals marking 85 percent compliance for 24 consecutive months are given the Gold Performance Achievement Award, with the Silver Performance Achievement award goes to those with 85 percent compliance for 12 consecutive months.
Lee Schwamm, national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines steering committee, noted that “Healthcare providers who use Get With The Guidelines are armed with the latest evidence-based guidelines and immediate access to clinical decision support. The goal of this initiative is to ultimately improve the quality of life and help reduce deaths among heart and stroke patients.”
For more information visit, www.OsceolaRegional.com.
Source: http://www.theledger.com/article/20090818/NEWS/908189957?Title=Osceola-Regional-Medical-Center-recognized-for-heart-patient-care
September 25, 2009
Futuristic Medicine: Robots Allow Physicians to Treat Patients Miles Away – ABC News
Physicians Can Take Vital Signs, Read X-Rays and Perform Exams
By TRACEY MARX
Aug. 23, 2009—
Welcome to the future, where your doctor could be hundreds of miles away.
Hospitals long have been a place to use new technologies, and the latest is aimed at helping doctors treat patients in rural areas, where hospitals don’t have access to specialized doctors.
The practice, known as telemedicine, is on the rise. According to Datamonitor, hospitals reportedly have invested more than $2 billion just this year and that number is expected to triple by 2012.
Baylor Medical Center in Dallas is one of 250 hospitals across the country that use the RP7i, a robot controlled through the Internet, to help patients in rural Waxahachie, Texas.
The RP7i might remind patients of the “Star Wars” character R2D2. They might even think it’s awkward at first, but patients warm up quickly to the 5-foot-4, 220-pound robot. InTouch Health, the company manufacturing the robots, rents them for up to $6,000 a month.
Despite the cost, doctors think the investment is worth the price.
“Ultimately, there is a steep initial cost to have this technology here, but over time it’s gonna pay for itself,” says Dr. Avian Kidd, medical director at Baylor Medical Center in Waxahachie.
The doctor manipulating the robot sits in a special control room with an Internet connection, two monitors, a mouse and a joystick. To drive the robot around, the doctor simply manipulates the joystick to move the robot back, forward and turn it around.
The doctor can check a patient’s heartbeat, x-rays and, if they need to take a closer look at the patient, it’s as easy as clicking the mouse.
Doctors Treat Patients From a Distance
Dr. Stephanie Woolley, an intensivist at Baylor Medical Center, has been using the robot they have nicknamed “Bessy” for a few months and already notices the benefits.
“Physically seeing the patient actually is very valuable to me because I can gather a huge amount of information just being able to look at the patient that I can’t do just speaking on the phone,” she says. “I am able to visualize everything that I could do as if I were standing right there.”
Seeing these patients remotely means fewer transfers by ambulance and helicopter, and it gives patients in rural hospitals access to specialists they could not see otherwise.
Doctors at Lahey Cline in Boston can see patients nearly 800 miles away on the island of Bermuda, while specialist at St. Joseph Mercy Oakland in Pontiac, Mich., have 32 robots deployed across the state of Michigan to help treat stroke patients.
But at a time when patients are already complaining about doctors’ bedside manners, is turning a doctor into a robot the answer? Patients and doctors seem to agree it looks more awkward than it is.
Patient who have encountered their doctors say it is more like hopping online and chatting with people — or even using video chat Web site Skype.
“It was different,” said Barbara Raymundo, 26, who is being treated by Dr. Woolley for pancreatitis. “I don’t think it’s any different than when you get online and chat to somebody on the Internet. So why not a doctor?”
Raymundo’s family was a bit more skeptical, but her husband, Raymundo, was just glad that his wife didn’t need to be transferred to Dallas, which would have taken them away from their home and six children.
“It was weird,” he said about the experience. “Instead of a person it’s a robot.”
Source: Futuristic Medicine: Robots Allow Physicians to Treat Patients Miles Away – ABC News.
September 25, 2009
Telestroke program to offer life-altering benefits
New telemedicine equipment to link Erlanger hospital brain specialists to patients in remote areas could result in life-altering treatments for stroke patients, a stroke specialist said Monday.
“You lose 120 million neurons every hour a stroke goes untreated,” said Dr. Thomas Devlin, director of the Erlanger Southeast Regional Stroke Center.
Erlanger budget and finance committee members on Monday gave their approval for the purchase of telemedicine equipment that, among other goals, will allow physicians at rural hospitals to discuss patients in real-time with neurologists at Erlanger and share brain scans.
WHAT IS TELEMEDICINE?
Telemedicine is the use of medical information exchanged electronically from one site to another to improve patients’ health. Telemedicine can include patient consultations and physician-to-physician consultations through video conferencing, remote patient monitoring, medical education and transmission of medical records such as brain scans and X-rays.
Erlanger’s telestroke program will at first focus on Erlanger Bledsoe hospital; Copper Basin Medical Center in Copperhill, Tenn.; Rhea Medical Center in Dayton, Tenn.; North Valley Medical Center in Dunlap, Tenn.; and other nonrural sites in Southeast Tennessee and North Georgia.
Without telemedicine, stroke sufferers in rural areas might not otherwise have quick access to a neurologist’s diagnosis, Dr. Devlin said.
“With telemedicine many more people potentially will be afforded (a critical stroke medication), which will be the only potential treatment they have in some cases, because we’ll be able to actually set eyes on the patient,” he said.
Erlanger’s full board of trustees will consider giving its final approval to the resolution at Thursday’s board meeting.
The project is funded through a $197,500 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and $375,000 in matching funds from Erlanger hospital.
Increased communication between regional physicians and Erlanger specialists also is expected to bring 120 more stroke admissions to Erlanger hospital over the next few years, officials said.
Also at the meeting, committee members gave preliminary approval to the purchase of a 16-slice CT scanner for $278,000. The equipment will replace the hospital’s now-defunct eight-slice CT scanner, which broke after a power outage.
Blaine Morris, vice president of clinical services, noted that the price tag on the new equipment is significantly discounted. The less sophisticated eight-slice scanner originally cost more than $1 million, he said.
via Chattanooga Times Free Press | Telestroke program to offer life-altering benefits.
September 25, 2009
Effective and Equitable Stroke Care
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Stroke is the third leading cause of death and the leading cause of adult disability in the United States. We know that intravenous tissue plasminogen activator [tPA] is the only FDA [US Food and Drug Administration]-approved treatment for ischemic stroke that has been shown to reduce disability. However, despite its widespread availability, it is only given to a small percentage of patients who may benefit from treatment. Why is that?
The medication is only safe and effective when administered in select patients and only up to 4.5 hours after the onset of symptoms. With many physicians who first see acute stroke patients reluctant to make the call to administer the medication, a primary barrier to treatment remains the inaccessibility of emergent neurologic expertise in stroke. One solution is the use of telemedicine for a neurologic consultation.
In fact, “telestroke” services provide swift access to neurologic expertise and empowers institutions without access to an acute stroke specialist to be able to provide optimal acute stroke care. The recommendation involves a remote consultation among practitioners and patients using high-quality videoconferencing, or HQ-VTC. Both an NIHSS [NIH Stroke Scale] assessment and a review of the head CT [computed tomography] scan are performed remotely using this protocol. This ultimately leads to an order by the stroke specialist to provide a lytic treatment decision.
Although not in widespread use yet, over 20 networks have been implemented and described. And, in an acknowledgement of gaining acceptance, in May, the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association published an evidence-based review of the scientific evidence supporting telecommunications in the delivery of acute stroke care.
So where do we go from here? Two steps need to take place. First, the concept of telestroke may provide a culture shock to many neurologists who, in being exposed to the technology, will need reassurance that it is only an interface to [the] continuing traditional values of excellent history taking and the physical exam, critical elements of neurologic diagnosis and treatment.
Second, regionalization of acute stroke care should be developed with stroke centers and nonstroke centers in close proximity defining their resources and needs and [with] telemedicine actively promoted when poor accessibility to expertise interferes with providing the standard of care. If we are serious about bridging the disparities related to acute stroke treatment, telemedicine is the next step.
That’s my opinion. I’m Dr. Joseph Schindler, Director of Stroke Services at Yale-New Haven Hospital and Assistant Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Yale University School of Medicine.
Source: Effective and Equitable Stroke Care.
September 25, 2009
The Reality of Robot Surrogates – Telepresence Options
September 25, 2009 | Chris Payatagool
How far are we from sending robots into the world in our stead?
BY Anne-Marie Corley // September 2009
23 September 2009–Imagine a world where you’re stronger, younger, better looking, and don’t age. Well, you do, but your robot surrogate–which you control with your mind from a recliner at home while it does your bidding in the world–doesn’t.
It’s a bit like The Matrix, but instead of a computer-generated avatar in a graphics-based illusion, in Surrogates–which opens Friday and stars Bruce Willis–you have a real titanium-and-fluid copy impersonating your flesh and blood and running around under your mental control. Other recent films have used similar concepts to ponder issues like outsourced virtual labor (Sleep Dealer) and incarceration (Gamer).
The real technology behind such fantastical fiction is grounded both in far-out research and practical robotics. So how far away is a world of mind-controlled personal automatons?
“We’re getting there, but it will be quite a while before we have anything that looks like Bruce Willis,” says Trevor Blackwell, the founder and CEO of Anybots, a robotics company in Mountain View, Calif., that builds “telepresence” robots controlled remotely like the ones in Surrogates.
Telepresence is action at a distance, or the projection of presence where you physically aren’t. Technically, phoning in to your weekly staff meeting is a form of telepresence. So is joysticking a robot up to a suspected IED in Iraq so a soldier can investigate the scene while sitting in the (relative) safety of an armored vehicle.
Researchers are testing brain-machine interfaces on rats and monkeys that would let the animals directly control a robot, but so far the telepresence interfaces at work in the real world are physical. Through wireless Internet connections, video cameras, joysticks, and sometimes audio, humans move robots around at the office, in the operating room, underwater, on the battlefield, and on Mars.
A recent study by NextGen Research, a market research firm, projects that in the next five years, telepresence will become a significant feature of the US $1.16 billion personal robotics market, meaning robots for you or your home.
According to the study’s project manager, Larry Fisher, telepresence “makes the most sense” for security and surveillance robots that would be used to check up on pets or family members from far away. Such robots could also allow health-care professionals to monitor elderly people taking medication at home to ensure the dosage and routine are correct.
Right now, most commercial teleoperated robots are just mobile webcams with speakers, according to NextGen. They can be programmed to roam a set path, or they can be controlled over the Internet by an operator. iRobot, the maker of the Roomba floor cleaner, canceled its telepresence robot, ConnectR, in January, choosing to wait until such a robot would be easier to use. But plenty of companies, such as Meccano/Erector and WowWee, are marketing personal telepresence bots.
Blackwell’s Anybots, for example, has developed an office stand-in called QA. It’s a Wi-Fi enabled, vaguely body-shaped wheeled robot with an ET-looking head that has cameras for eyes and a display in its chest that shows an image of the person it’s standing in for. You can slap on virtual-reality goggles, sensor gloves, and a backpack of electronics to link to it over the Internet for an immersive telepresence experience. Or you can just connect to the robot through your laptop’s browser.
Photo: Anybots
Blackwell has been using QA to telecommute to his office for the past few weeks so he can enjoy the “sun streaming in” his windows in the morning while his robot sits next to his desk at the office, available for anyone to approach and ask him a question. He can hear and answer through a Bluetooth headset on his end, and he can follow colleagues if they want to show him something. “Or I can go pester them in their cubicles,” he says.
Blackwell’s real dream is a teleoperated robotic servant to wash the dishes and check the oil in his car while he’s watching the kids. That might be creepy, considering it means that someone else–whether from a call-center type of operation run by a large company, an outsourced sea of computers, or someone logged in from three doors down (granted, with your approval)–could be peering into your world from afar (á la Sleep Dealer). But it could free up time for the good things in life if done right, Blackwell says.
Not all of today’s telepresence robots are for personal use. Yulun Wang, CEO of InTouch Health, a Santa Barbara, Calif., company that provides medical telepresence robots to hospitals, says his goal is to solve the problem of getting “the right [medical] expertise to the right place at the right time.” For urgent health-care needs such as stroke, critical care trauma, or high-risk pregnancy, medical specialists aren’t available at every care center, Wang says.
That’s where robots can help out. The St. Joseph Mercy Oakland hospital, in Pontiac, Mich., for example, “has the physician expertise and the technology to provide the latest in stroke care,” Wang says. But outlying hospitals do not. With InTouch Health’s RP-7i robot, controlled by a remote doctor through a joystick and a secure Internet connection, 31 Michigan hospitals take advantage of St. Joseph’s doctors to treat patients with symptoms of stroke. According to Wang, only 4 percent of stroke patients across the country get treated with the right drugs. That’s partly because drugs need to be administered within three hours of the first symptoms, which often can’t happen in a remote location. Within the Michigan RP-7i network, Wang says, 85 percent of patients are now treated appropriately and in time.
RP-7 (RP-7i’s predecessor) has also helped train and advise surgeons from more than 8000 kilometers away. In 2007, Dr. Alex Gandsas, head of the Bariatric and Minimally Invasive Surgery division of Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, used the robot to remotely train two Argentine doctors on a procedure to treat morbid obesity. For three months, the doctors in BahÃa Blanca, Argentina, logged in to a robot in Baltimore that followed Gandsas on his rounds and in surgery.
When it came time to schedule three surgeries in Argentina, Gandsas reversed the process. He sent the robot to Argentina and logged in himself, becoming the “virtual doctor” observing during the procedures and postoperative rounds. “We concluded that operations can be learned totally by remote presence,” Gandsas says. And with the number of surgeons graduating from medical school decreasing while the population increases, Gandsas believes “telemedicine will come to the rescue.”
But no one would watch a movie about a doctor–or an action hero, for that matter–joysticking a robot around. So in Surrogates and many other films, the connection to the robot goes straight to the brain. “The keyboard was invented in the 19th century, and we still use it and love it,” says Jose Principe, director of the Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory at the University of Florida. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t better alternatives. The brain has exquisite control of muscles. There’s the possibility of finding the code and translating it to machines.”
Photo: InTouch Health
Principe and his collaborator, Justin Sanchez of UF’s departments of pediatrics, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering, hope to link computer algorithms with biological systems, “short-circuiting the brain-spinal cord-muscle link” and using the brain’s “intent” to control a robotic device.
In the late 1990s, neuroscientists discovered that by implanting electrodes in rats’ brains and connecting them to computers operating robotic levers, it was possible to decode the intent of rats to move the levers for a food or drink reward. Then monkeys succeeded in mentally playing video games to get a juice reward. These experiments showed that the animals’ motor cortices continued to produce the brain patterns they’d learned when physically moving a robot, even when the animals weren’t actually moving their paws or arms.
The latest work from Principe and Sanchez is moving one level further, using the motor cortex for actions that aren’t related to movement. Rats in their lab learned to maneuver a robotic gripper outside their cages to move an LED sideways–an action unrelated to any movement the rat can make on its own. Principe says this is a proof of concept that shows rats are using the motor cortex to do something other than move a body part.
The hope is that, eventually, a “high-level dialogue” between brains and computer agents could decide how to move a robot in the world, says Principe.
In the meantime, for lack of a good brain interface to the robotic surrogate of your dreams (and a few other technical obstacles), you’d best go out and face the world yourself.
Blackwell has been using QA to telecommute to his office for the past few weeks so he can enjoy the “sun streaming in” his windows in the morning while his robot sits next to his desk at the office, available for anyone to approach and ask him a question. He can hear and answer through a Bluetooth headset on his end, and he can follow colleagues if they want to show him something. “Or I can go pester them in their cubicles,” he says.
Blackwell’s real dream is a teleoperated robotic servant to wash the dishes and check the oil in his car while he’s watching the kids. That might be creepy, considering it means that someone else–whether from a call-center type of operation run by a large company, an outsourced sea of computers, or someone logged in from three doors down (granted, with your approval)–could be peering into your world from afar (á la Sleep Dealer). But it could free up time for the good things in life if done right, Blackwell says.
Not all of today’s telepresence robots are for personal use. Yulun Wang, CEO of InTouch Health, a Santa Barbara, Calif., company that provides medical telepresence robots to hospitals, says his goal is to solve the problem of getting “the right [medical] expertise to the right place at the right time.” For urgent health-care needs such as stroke, critical care trauma, or high-risk pregnancy, medical specialists aren’t available at every care center, Wang says.
That’s where robots can help out. The St. Joseph Mercy Oakland hospital, in Pontiac, Mich., for example, “has the physician expertise and the technology to provide the latest in stroke care,” Wang says. But outlying hospitals do not. With InTouch Health’s RP-7i robot, controlled by a remote doctor through a joystick and a secure Internet connection, 31 Michigan hospitals take advantage of St. Joseph’s doctors to treat patients with symptoms of stroke. According to Wang, only 4 percent of stroke patients across the country get treated with the right drugs. That’s partly because drugs need to be administered within three hours of the first symptoms, which often can’t happen in a remote location. Within the Michigan RP-7i network, Wang says, 85 percent of patients are now treated appropriately and in time.
RP-7 (RP-7i’s predecessor) has also helped train and advise surgeons from more than 8000 kilometers away. In 2007, Dr. Alex Gandsas, head of the Bariatric and Minimally Invasive Surgery division of Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, used the robot to remotely train two Argentine doctors on a procedure to treat morbid obesity. For three months, the doctors in BahÃa Blanca, Argentina, logged in to a robot in Baltimore that followed Gandsas on his rounds and in surgery.
When it came time to schedule three surgeries in Argentina, Gandsas reversed the process. He sent the robot to Argentina and logged in himself, becoming the “virtual doctor” observing during the procedures and postoperative rounds. “We concluded that operations can be learned totally by remote presence,” Gandsas says. And with the number of surgeons graduating from medical school decreasing while the population increases, Gandsas believes “telemedicine will come to the rescue.”
But no one would watch a movie about a doctor–or an action hero, for that matter–joysticking a robot around. So in Surrogates and many other films, the connection to the robot goes straight to the brain. “The keyboard was invented in the 19th century, and we still use it and love it,” says Jose Principe, director of the Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory at the University of Florida. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t better alternatives. The brain has exquisite control of muscles. There’s the possibility of finding the code and translating it to machines.”
Principe and his collaborator, Justin Sanchez of UF’s departments of pediatrics, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering, hope to link computer algorithms with biological systems, “short-circuiting the brain-spinal cord-muscle link” and using the brain’s “intent” to control a robotic device.
In the late 1990s, neuroscientists discovered that by implanting electrodes in rats’ brains and connecting them to computers operating robotic levers, it was possible to decode the intent of rats to move the levers for a food or drink reward. Then monkeys succeeded in mentally playing video games to get a juice reward. These experiments showed that the animals’ motor cortices continued to produce the brain patterns they’d learned when physically moving a robot, even when the animals weren’t actually moving their paws or arms.
The latest work from Principe and Sanchez is moving one level further, using the motor cortex for actions that aren’t related to movement. Rats in their lab learned to maneuver a robotic gripper outside their cages to move an LED sideways–an action unrelated to any movement the rat can make on its own. Principe says this is a proof of concept that shows rats are using the motor cortex to do something other than move a body part.
The hope is that, eventually, a “high-level dialogue” between brains and computer agents could decide how to move a robot in the world, says Principe.
In the meantime, for lack of a good brain interface to the robotic surrogate of your dreams (and a few other technical obstacles), you’d best go out and face the world yourself.
