For blog
5 I decided to focus on something straight out of Sci-Fi since yesterday was
May the 4th (May the Fourth be with you). In this case, I looked at
how the robotics industry is starting to take over health care. There was a
time when there were less electronics in the hospitals and more work being done
by the actual nurses and doctors. That isn’t to say they are not doing a lot of
work today, but look at simple tasks like taking blood pressure. They can
put a simple machine on your arm and it does everything for the nurse and they just need to write down the values. I had
my gall bladder surgery, and while it wasn’t performed by robots, it was done by
new tools that made it less likely for complications. In the past, the surgeons would have to cut you open leading to a much longer recovery time. I was off from work for one week. With that being said, now
gall bladders can be removed by robots. A trans-Atlantic surgery occurred in
2001 “when teams of fiber-optically linked surgeons in New York and Strasbourg,
France, robotically removed the gall bladder of a 68-year-old woman using
robotic arms” https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/robotics/robo-doctor-will-see-you-now.
The tools in the image below are actually shown being used on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA3EVXdB3aE.
Watching
this video fascinated me. To think a robotic arm could be so delicate. Just
watching the surgeon’s hands use the machine was quite fascinating. The robot
in this video, da Vinci was the robotic machine which actually has been
approved by the FDA in 2000. The possibilities of robotics seem to be unlimited
at this point. I start thinking of the movie Elysium from 2013 in which a
machine could diagnose a little girl and cure her without any assistance from a
doctor or surgeon. If you haven’t seen the movie here is the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMoJHf7rCQ.
Of course, I feel as though we are a long way from that occurring, but da Vinci
is just a small step on the way to get there. Surgery isn’t the only place we
could see robotics occurring in the surgery.
What if your
nurse was a robot? Robots “can now patrol hospital hallways on more routine
rounds, checking on patients in different rooms and managing their individual
charts and vital signs without direct human intervention” (https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/bioengineering/top-5-medical-technology-innovations).
This is a huge asset to nurses and doctors who are typically over tasked. They could
be used clean and sanitize rooms, pour patient medicine dosages, and even draw blood
(https://www.healthcare-administration-degree.net/faq/how-are-robots-changing-healthcare/).
The draw blood one I find extremely intriguing as I have had several nurses in
the past apologize for sticking my arm repeatedly to find a vein. The simple
fact is that robotics are making the healthcare field safer and less
troublesome. This can be a huge benefit to the medical field and staff. Of
course, these robots won’t actually replace doctors any time soon.
The cost
of such devices would be astronomical. I mean looking at an MRI I had, it cost $2,500
dollars. That was for 30 minutes. Thankfully, I have good insurance and didn’t
have to pay and that much. That was a simple scan though. Robotics surgery is a
little more intrusive, and thus more expensive. The da Vinci machine itself
costs around $2 million, and the surgery itself can cost $3-6K more than the
non-robotic surgery (https://www.healthline.com/health-news/is-da-vinci-robotic-surgery-revolution-or-ripoff-021215#2).
Most hospitals cannot afford that type of cost. There is another issue of
security. Since my blog is based upon security in the healthcare, I will turn
my focus towards security with regards to robotics.
Robots
are computers, much more advance programming to be sure, but still computers.
Thus, they are vulnerable to malware and viruses are like a normal computer. In
fact, a popular robotic operating system was shown to be vulnerable to injection
and eavesdropping attacks (https://www.roboticstomorrow.com/article/2018/04/securing-the-robots/11719).
The same article also states that several robots “had insecure connections,
authentication issues, missing authorization schemes, weak cryptography, weak
default configurations and were built using vulnerable open source frameworks
and libraries”. Researchers were actually to intercept and change the commands
sent by the doctor causing the robot to become jerky and hard to control. I’m
not entirely sure I would want a robot performing surgery on me to suddenly go
haywire and start jerking while cutting into me.
Now
imagine that there was a robot dispersing your medications, and suddenly was “hacked”
and gave you a medicine you were highly allergic to. Or, one of those robots
going room to room could change the drip that is going into your IV. I have
already shown in previous posts that medical devices could be hacked. Robotics would
be no different. The truth of the matter is that if there is an operating
system it could potentially be hacked. I think that is why it is even more
important to build security into systems and not an afterthought, especially
with systems that are in control of our lives.
I
personally am all for robotics in the healthcare field, as I do think they can
make the lives of doctors and nurses easier, and less stressful for them. A doctor
or nurse that isn’t running around like a chicken with their head cut off is
typically a friendlier person. Although, I’m not sure I am ready for robots to
go around taking my blood while giving me bedside care. Sometimes, I feel like the
face to face still makes me feel a little more comfortable and at ease, especially
at a place I typically dread going to anyways.
Figure 1 https://qz.com/989137/when-a-robot-ai-doctor-misdiagnoses-you-whos-to-blame/
