In the first few months of 2020, the outbreak in China, where 84,000 people have been infected and 4,600 have died, revealed the country's willingness and readiness to deploy robotic technology as part of a medical emergency. did. Service robots were used in hospitals and publicly shared spaces to clean, take temperatures and deliver food, to reduce people-to-people contact.
Guang-zhong Yang, the institute's founder dean, says, "I was staying in a hotel under quarantine and my takeaway food was being controlled by a white, cylindrical robot with a screen on wheels and digitally locking the food inside. Was delivered by Qualified Hatch." of Medical Robotics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University - China's first academic institute dedicated to the study of medical robotics, which opened in 2019.
“I ordered food from the restaurant by phone, got it delivered, and the robot brought it to my room and rang my phone so I could open the door and get food,” he says.
"In the United Kingdom, I would classify that kind of robotic activity as a novelty, but in China it's slowly becoming less unusual," says Yang, who last year was director of the Hamlin Center for Robotic Surgery. He moved to Shanghai after working as a. Imperial College London for 12 years.
This gear change in the use of robotics began in 2012, when China's Five-Year Economic Plan, published as a statement of intent by the central government, made it clear that service robots would become a dominant technology. The idea was to enable them to perform a range of important social functions, from firefighters to minimally invasive surgery.
The use of robots in the medical field to help in areas such as nursing, physical rehabilitation and surgery has been a particular priority, says Yao Li, a biomedical and robotics engineer at the Stanford Robotics Laboratory in California and founder of Bourns Medical Robotics. Located in Chengdu, China and Silicon Valley, California.
"China's need for skilled clinical staff in areas such as health care has contributed to the government's focus on the robotics industry to help care for citizens in the future," he says.
According to Jian-kun Hu, director of surgery at Sichuan University's West China Hospital in Chengdu, one of China's most prestigious medical centers, his hospital began planning the introduction of robotic technology in 2012. Its purpose was to benefit the patients. To reduce the minimally invasive surgery and some heavy workload on the staff. For example, during surgery for gastric or colorectal cancer, the robotic system helps surgeons see small lymphatic vessels, nerves, and nerves that need to be preserved, Hu says. He said the outbreak has prompted hospitals to accelerate the clinical application of robotic technology.
In 2015, the hospital purchased a US-made general-surgical system for minimally invasive surgery called a da Vinci—a four-armed, chandelier-like device operated by a surgeon via a computer console. That year, 12 more similar systems were installed in the country. In 2018, the hospital installed a ROSA robotic surgical assistant for use in neurosurgery and last September acquired a logistics robot that has been disinfecting isolation wards during outbreaks. This year, the hospital intends to expand the use of logistics robots, to reduce the burden and danger on staff, he says.
home made robot
Although hospitals are keen to use more robots, the market for such technology in China is relatively young, says Miao Li, co-founder of Cobot, a four-year-old company in Wuhan that makes easy-to-use operating systems. Multipurpose service and industrial robots.
Currently, only service robots that perform basic tasks like delivering medicines and food to people are affordable for businesses and hospitals, he says. "You can now buy these simple service robots for around US$10,000 as these robots are also used in hotels, restaurants and other similar scenarios."
A disinfection robot for use in a hospital, however, would typically cost $30,000-80,000, Lee says. The da Vinci technique cost the hospital in western China about $3 million, according to Intuitive Fosun in Shanghai, which supplied the equipment.
Yao Li says that the need of the Chinese robotics market is an increased number of domestic Chinese robotics companies that will stimulate competition and demand, and ultimately reduce costs.
China doesn't make its own counterpart to the da Vinci system, but it's starting to catch on. In 2016, Beijing-based company Tinwei Medical Technologies swiftly received approval from the central government to sell TiRobot, the first robot-assisted surgical product made in China. It has only one arm that can perform spinal surgery.
Lee expects his company, which was founded in 2016, to launch its robotic surgical system soon.
