Robotic nurses in development

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US want to explore the concept of robotic nurses and the way it can revolutionise the medical industry, says Azorobotics.

The experiment involves training a robot named Cody, which was designed with the objective of either cleaning a patient's arm or touching it in order to comfort them. Researchers wanted to observe if patients reacted differently to each of his actions.

According to Fox News, at Purdue University in Indiana, researchers are developing a gesture-driven robotic scrub nurse prototype that may one day relieve nurses of some their technical duties or replace the scrub technician who is at times responsible for fulfilling those tasks.

The vision is for the robot to assume two tasks that are monotonous but extremely important for a scrub nurse or tech - passing the instruments to the surgeon and monitoring the number of instruments being used -but faster than a human.

The goal is to help reduce medical errors such as leaving instruments inside a patient's body.

Instead of having to rely on nurses to browse through electronic medical records once an operation starts - allowing room for error and delays - the surgeon could browse through records on his own without leaving the sterile field.