Brain-operated bionic hand.

We are living in a time where the concept of robotic healthcare isn’t as foreign as it might seem.  In regard to healthcare, the surge of innovation is supported by a strong attention to the world of technology and robotics. The evolution of the healthcare market is astonishing. We are becoming more accustom to the idea of automation and exploring the possibilities with open minds rather than anxiety. (Photos and videos)

 

 

This collection of robotic healthcare innovations ranges from fixed equipment to prosthetics and concentrates on the ways we’re seeing an exciting mix of solutions that merge the fruits of Silicon Valley with the hospital.

The 7-Miles Orthosis System Brings Ease and Efficiency to Travel on Foot

There are so many exciting possibilities wrapped up in an invention like the 7-Miles Orthosis. This innovative mechanism is a system of robotic leg braces that supports the human body and provides assistive propulsion. It would prove particularly advantageous for people with some physical disabilities.

As part of the Dassault Design Challenge, Josef Ludvik Bohm devised this complex contraption that fastens to the wearer at the hips, the knees, the ankles and the feet. It can be adjusted to suit people of various heights. The 7Miles bears the weight of the user and helps to keep him upright while it steps one foot in front of the other with little to no effort on the part of the person. The 7-Miles Orthosis could help the handicapped walk again and also serve as a swift commuting suit.

This Service Robot Makes Wheelchair-Bound Patients’ Lives Easier

The Resyone robotic wheelchair-bed hybrid by Panasonic is the first robotic device to be certified ISO13482-compliant, the new global safety standard for service robots.

The Resyone blends an electric care bed with an electric reclining wheelchair. A section of the bed detaches to form the reclining wheelchair, allowing the patient to easily transfer from bed to wheelchair without needing to be assisted by multiple caregivers. This service robot only requires the attentions of one caregiver to support a safe and comfortable transfer between bed and wheelchair, lightening caregivers’ workload and making it easier for patients to get out of bed more frequently.

The electric bed’s mattress splits in half, with one half separating out to form the body of the chair. Therefore, patients simply need to move over a few inches, and with a few adjustments, find themselves sitting upright in an electric wheelchair.

The FIT Adjustable Prosthetic Grows with Its User

The FIT adjustable prosthetic is an artificial limb built to grow with its user. Designer Oz Benderman created FIT in order to help child amputees in developing countries save money on prosthetics. Since children are constantly growing, having an adaptable prosthetic means that the user is always using a correctly sized limb. As a result, those that don’t have easy access to medical treatment can maintain mobile.

FIT works to grow with a child over multiple years. A notched central rod allows the user to lengthen or shorten the prosthetic as needed. Thus, anybody can easily adjust the prosthetic without professional assistance.

Benderman designed FIT to be easily distributable to children with transtibial amputations in developing countries. FIT has the potential to cost less than $10 per unit if mass-produced.

The Bio-Cleaner 2 is an Underwater Appliance That Breaks Down Metals

The innovative Bio-Cleaner 2 functions almost like an underwater vacuum, sucking up liquid and spitting it out again, in much better quality than how it encountered it. This cutting-edge, serpentine machine has been developed to tidy up the environment beneath the ocean’s surface, aiding particularly in the effort to filter polluted H2O.

Hsu Hsiang-Han, Wang Jhih-Jie, Wen Tzu-I and Luo Yih-Wenn developed this amazing android. It draws in water that’s been contaminated with metals, pulls it down its long and meandering body and exposes it to bacteria that break down the hard material. The modular configuration enables you to increase the length of the Bio-Cleaner 2 if the job is much bigger. It would prove quite useful following collisions or submersions of ships.

Autom Helps You Stick to Your Fitness Plan

Finding it hard to stick to your fitness goals? Constantly cheating throughout the day on your diet? Autom, the robot fitness coach, is designed with your health in mind.

The talking robot fitness coach created by Intuitive Automata was created to talk you through daily diet and exercise routines. Using an LCD touch screen, you can communicate with the robot fitness coach, punching in your daily food schedule and physical activities. Autom is approximately 15 inches tall but the best part about Autom is the fact that no two conversations will ever be alike because the robot fitness coach is connected wirelessly to the Internet!

The ‘Medirobot’ Medical Robotic Assistant Eliminates Discomfort

Being in a hospital is hard enough, which is why the ‘Medirobot’ Medical Robotic Assistant is such a welcomed addition to staff. For those suffering from very serious injuries or who simply cannot move around on their own yet, this robot helps transport them around the hospital easily and, hopefully, as pain-free as possible.

Designed by Jules Parmentier and Nancy Nguyen in collaboration with Pilotfish Taipei and Munich teams, the Medirobot Medical Robotic Assistant is currently in the final concept and design development stage. It essentially reduces the physical efforts for the caregiver and the discomfort for the patient by eliminating steps in the process of moving them. Instead of needing an extra lifting device or wheelchair, the Medirobot Medical Robotic Assistant does all the work.

This Robotic Exoskeleton is Changing Lives

A woman paralyzed from the waist down has regained the ability to walk, thanks to a robotic exoskeleton. Amanda Boxtel was told she would never walk again after suffering a serious ski accident, but a 3D-printed robotic exoskeleton has helped her walk again.

Robotic exoskeletons were once the stuff of movies, giving fictional superheroes superhuman powers. But fiction has now seemingly become reality. Amanda’s implant was made by scanning her body and inputting her attributes into a 3D-printer to create a personalized robotic exoskeleton.

This is an example of how technology can make the seemingly impossible possible. On the basis of medical science alone, doctors were right in telling Amanda Boxtel that she’d never walk again. Cutting-edge robotics have made possible what no existing medicines or surgeries can, and that’s encouraging.

The Gymbot Personal Trainer Robot is Programmed for Health

Personal trainers have good reason to fear the Gymbot Personal Trainer Robot. Massimo Battaglia’s health bot is designed to whip the obese and overweight into shape in the year 2020. The Gymbot is designed to be by your side 24 hours a day and is programmed to correct laziness and poor eating habits.

The Gymbot Personal Trainer Robot has a camera and microphone allowing it to communicate with and analyze its client. The bot can check your heart rate and analyze your body fat level to get a more accurate picture of what you need to do to become healthier. Battaglia’s creation is programmed to get you off the couch and even perform some exercises with you. A personal trainer robot could be a great way to help the world get into shape. The robot would probably come with a high price, but that price would buy you a lifetime of training and save you money on medical bills caused by being overweight.

This Bionic Hand Restores the Feeling of Touch to Amputees

This bionic hand may restore a sense of normalcy to a difficult situation. Losing a limb can be one of the toughest experiences a person can have, but a Swiss research team is trying to make rehabbing an easier experience.

Tragedy can strike at any time without warning. While losing a limb is a horrible experience there can be a silver lining with this new bionic hand. Bionic appendages help to make things more normal for the wearer. While a regular prosthetic hand can be useful for lifting and carrying things, it doesn’t return the feeling of touch to the user.

In order to use the prosthetic hand, the user must have electrodes implanted in their arm. After the electrodes are implanted, the bionic arm is attached and interacts with the electrodes to restore partial feeling to the arm.

Electrolux Germs Scour Your Home and Clean Its Surfaces Sustainably

This concept for Electrolux Germs attempts to accomplish two goals within the domain of domestic sanitation. Firstly, the system proposes an eco-friendly means of operation; secondly, the idea is to not completely sterilize the home, for there is great value to keeping some bacteria alive.

To use Joris Bonnesoeur’s invention, you would fill the tray of the square-shaped base with filtered water from the shower in your own bathroom. This resourceful proposal makes it unnecessary to waste fresh water from the tap. The liquid is passed into the little robotic minions, enabling them to offer steam-cleaning capabilities. Their bristled bottoms do the scrubbing on floors, walls and windows, thanks to concealed suction cups. The autonomous Electrolux Germs system maintains communication so to efficiently cover every square inch of the room.

The Panasonic Hair-Washing Robot Helps Take Care of The Elderly

The Panasonic hair-washing robot is a natural companion for the Panasonic wheelchair bed, and the makers hope that both will help to care for Japan’s growing elderly population.

The sophisticated elder-care system is designed to deliver the user from his or her transformer bed — after it transforms itself into a wheelchair — to the Panasonic hair-washing robot. The robot uses sixteen mechatronic fingers to wash and rinse the patient’s hair. The system also records the biometrics of the head’s shape and keeps track of head massage preferences and other patient information.

The Versa Foot is a Custom Prosthetic Foot for Extreme Sports

Mike Schultz won the 2013 Popular Science Invention award for the creation of a prosthetic foot called Versa Foot. The Versa Foot is a customizable performance sport prosthetic made for above and below knee amputees

Schultz won multiple X Games Medals wearing the prosthetic he built himself. The Versa Foot allows amputees to compete on an even level with non-amputees on things like snowmobiles and motorcycles. Schultz used FOX motorcycle parts to create the Versa Foot and the product is one of the most customizable prosthetics out there. It includes adjustable shock absorbers, interchangeable sole plates and four different ankle configurations. The Versa Foot is made to stand up to extreme sports and weather conditions.

Bradley Nelson Created a New Technology That May Save Your Eyesight

This new technology may save your eyesight. Bradley Nelson is a professor of robotics and intelligent systems at ETH-Zurich. Leading a team of researchers, he has created tiny devices that will help save your eyesight. These tiny robotic devices are injected into the eye and can be steered through the eye’s fluids with external magnetic fields.

Nelson and his team of researchers have done this by coating these micro-robots with nanospheres made out of a special dye that will turn the devices into oxygen detectors. When they are exposed to a specific wavelength of light, the dye glows. A Fluorescence that disappears quickly will then indicate high amounts of oxygen that are surrounding the dye. If the dye fades slowly, this indicates low amounts of oxygen. Essentially the new oxygen-sensing robots will indicate when the blood flow to the eye is restricted, which is generally the result of vision loss.

The ‘Veebot’ Automates the Entire Process of Drawing Blood

Engineers at Stanford worked to remove another piece of human fallibility from the medical field by creating an automated blood robot called the ‘Veebot.’ The Veebot is a system for completing the entire process of collecting blood from beginning to end.

The robot starts by using ultrasound and infrared optics to locate the perfect vein to draw from. After finding the correct position, the catheter is inserted accurately. Finally, the vial of blood is capped and labelled automatically for the doctor to pick up.

Each robot was created to be much more accurate than most doctors are. Since over a fifth of all venepunctures performed by humans miss on the first try, the Veebot is performing a valuable service by automating it.

The Pentagon’s Fiber Optic Arm is Being Fitted to Amputated Veterans

When an American soldier is wounded in the process of serving his country, the Pentagon and armed services have a tendency of throwing their full weight behind his recovery, and the Fiber Optic Arm hopes to give the most maimed and impaired veterans a chance at recovery.

According to a military-funded team of researchers at the Southern Methodist University, the best chance of giving prosthetics a degree of verisimilitude is with laser beams. A bundle of laser-filled fibers will be the intermediary between the next generation of prosthetic hands and the severed limbs they’ve been attached to. The Fiber Optic Arm can successfully translate the minute nerve impulses the body produces to tell limbs when and how to move, and will deliver those messages to a robotic hand. With tests being conducted as we speak, the next stage will be to send those neural messages back to the brain, so that the arm will be able to detect heat, pain and pressure.

Here’s hoping the soldiers who served without question will have the pleasure of fully functional limbs as soon as possible.

The LifeHand 2 Artificial Arm May Bring Back Feelings That Were Once Lost

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Dennis Sorensen received a ‘LifeHand 2’ to give him the chance to feel again. Ten years ago he was setting off fireworks on New Year’s Eve in Denmark when the terrible accident happened.

Doctors had no choice but to amputate what was left of his hand. Dennis has been using a prosthetic hand since. At the moment, Dennis has no feelings in his hand, but the hope is strong for the LifeHand 2 to provide him the chance to feel again.

Silvestro Micera is the director of the Translational Neural Engineering Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, he says the project aims “to give back as much as possible natural sensory information.” Sensors have been added to each finger and tiny electrodes in the arm connect to the sensors to nerves. There is still a lot of time before we will know for sure, but so far so good for Dennis.

John Hopkins University Creates the ‘da Vinici’ to Aid Patients

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Utilizing the da Vinci Surgical system, John Hopkins University has created a gesture-controlled medical device. The ‘da Vinici’ (a robot-assisted surgical device) can now be gesturally controlled with the wave of a hand thanks to the John Hopkins Computational department’s program.

Though this is a hack and still in the testing stages, the idea of less contaminated surgical room gives much hope to future patients and the medical world. As technology advances and technique precision become increasingly accurate, we will begin to see medical devices whose original intent are to be gestured controlled robots that aid in performing tough surgeries and medical repairs. It’s amazing to think of how the health industry will be revolutionized by inventions like this.

The Human Support Robot Provides Added Assistance to the Disabled