Get Well Sooner

Get Well Sooner Nicole Kobie Investigates How Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence And Robots Are Making Their Way Into Our Hospitals To Support Rather Than Replace Humans.

- Nicole Kobie

The future of medicine is robotic, virtual and artificially intelligent;but it’s still deeply human.While cutting-edge tech is working its way into hospitals everywhere - even the under funded NHS -clinicians aren’t simply flinging around gadgetry in the hope that something helps heal patients.

Instead, robots are being controlled by top-end surgeons for faster healing operations, while virtual reality (VR) is being used to offer personalised, one-on-one surgical tuition, as well as enhancing psychological counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder. Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t replacing doctors, but helping them spot worrisome symptoms and read medical scans with a more careful eye.

None of this is to replace doctors or automate healthcare. Instead, it’s designed to give doctors and other clinical staff more time to spend with patients, perhaps meaning robots, AI and VRwill help put humans back at the centre of healthcare. Here we explain how such technologies work — and look at where they’re already being used here in the UK.

ROBOTIC SURGERY

Robots have been used in surgery for years, all the way back to 1983, when surgeons in Vancouver used the ‘arthrobot’ to assist with orthopaedic surgery, with the robot manipulating the patient’s limb during the operation, while the human surgeon did the rest of the work. Since then, robots have slowly invaded surgical theatres here in the UK, with the Royal Marsden NHS Trust the first to roll out da Vinci robots in 2007.