The Role of Robotics in Nursing

Robotics is a discipline in engineering that deals with electrical engineering, computer science, and mechanical engineering. While there has been an increasing need for intelligent machines in the healthcare sector, the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated the need to align technology and artificial intelligence with healthcare, particularly nursing. Because the SARSS-CoV-2 virus spreads rapidly through physical human interaction, there was a need to physically distance patients.

So, many healthcare facilities decided to adopt robots to remotely carry out some patient care that would have required personal presence. For instance, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston designed a robot to interview and diagnose patients exhibiting mild symptoms of Covid-19.

There is enough research to back up the efficacy of robots in the healthcare sector. Consequently, an increasing number of nursing and care homes in technologically advanced countries like Japan now use service robots to care for patients under their supervision. The use of robots in daily life is not particularly alien to the Japanese, considering that the country currently has over 5,000 nursing and care homes integrating service robots in nursing care to test.

Most of these nursing care robots have been engineered such that nurses can remotely provide care to bedridden patients in their custody. Aside from interfacing directly with the patients, nursing robots also help carry out menial and essential tasks like laundry and other household chores. This is particularly useful when the bedridden patient lives with a highly contagious disease. Some nursing homes are beginning to program robots to administer medical treatment to patients. However, several healthcare policymakers are still wary of this move.

While human nurses might take considerable time to train and become proficient in their roles, most robot nurses are significantly easier to “train” and, in the long run, are likely to provide more effective healthcare to patients at a lower cost. A hospital administrator once noted that robots could effect a 65 percent reduction in human labor costs incurred by healthcare facilities annually. Similarly, they can do odd, repetitive, and arduous tasks that most humans cannot do or would rather not do.

Further, it has been found that robots are more accurate with data. They can store important and relevant medical records and data with little to no likelihood of error. When medical records are properly documented, they can assist healthcare workers in adequately diagnosing patients and providing the requisite healthcare solution.

Likewise, assistive robots have also been proven to assist older people or people with disabilities to live independently with little or no human aid. Assistive robots can be categorized into socially-assistive and physically assistive robots. Socially assistive robots help patients through their regular and daily social interactions, while physically- assistive robots help patients achieve physically intensive tasks.

Robots are not in competition with nurses. Instead, they are vital in ensuring that nurses are relieved of menial and monotonous tasks, giving them more time to focus on other tasks crucial to their primary responsibilities.

Telerobotics is another important contribution of robots to the health sector. This robotic system allows healthcare workers to execute surgeries and other forms of post-surgical care across different physical locations through wireless or wired communication networks. The telerobotics can carry out nursing duties by serving as virtual assistants to the doctor during surgical procedures.