Dr. Robot On Duty
from the robots,-robots-everywhere dept
Roland Piquepaille writes “This new high-tech robot is currently being tested at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. And so far, it has visited 20 pleased patients. The robot doesn’t deliver advice itself. Instead, patients interact with a real physician through a computer screen, a camera and a speaker. “Looking at a computer terminal, the doctor directing the robot sees what the robot sees and hears what the robot hears. At the other end, patients can see and talk to the doctor’s face displayed on a flat screen that sits on the robot’s ‘shoulders.'” Look at my blog to see Dr. Robot in action and more details. And don’t worry, this new kind of robot is not intended to replace a human physician.”
Comments on “Dr. Robot On Duty”
Window Dressing
It would be more practical to just have a monitor and cam at the bed, instead of this fucking thing rolling down the hall and obstructing gurneys. Physicians will hate it because it will mean more interruptions by patient calls, nurses will hate it because it overrides their moral authority over the patient. Johns Hopkins University Hospital is also located inside Baltimore’s inner-city ghetto, so it will lead to questions of why white doctors have these silly toys to play with while black patients are scraping by. JHU’s nursing school is the old-fashioned philanthropist variety that values Florence Nightingale types — they’re the only nursing school in the US with a Peace Corps Fellowship program; despite their stature, they do not have a nursing informatics program. The technophobes in the nursing department will use this incident to make the shit hit the fan against the medical school, to blackmail them into giving the nursing school more funds.