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Robots In Health Care – The Age of Artificial Health: Automated Nurses?
By
Ayinla Daniel, RN, Rctn.
Robots In Health Care Practice.
I featured an article on Care City about the advent of robots in surgery and today, I would like to talk about robots in Nursing practice! Sounds weird huh?
Do These Robotic Nurses Need A Uniform, A Badge or A License?
Who would have ever thought that some day in the history of man or better put in the history of health care, mechanical beings will be the ones taking care of our sick ones? This is no longer a dream, like our proposed journey to Mars, but this is already becoming a solid reality! Tangible.
Imagine walking into a hospital, and the next thing you see is a mechanical being strolling towards you (remember those star wars robots, looking like big lollipops with box bodies and long flexible arms?) on its wheels, with beeps, bleeps, clicks and mild whirling coming from the numerous complex mechanical parts in it’s CPU and the next thing it greets you, warmly welcomes you, guides you to take your seat and begins to assess you; take your vital signs, check your height – it practically does the initial assessment on you and feeds the information to a Physician waiting to further implement a treatment plan. Hmm.
Well, this may be progress, but it is still very disturbing, because technology gradually infiltrates health care practice, and believe it or not, robots are now being programmed to undertake very complex surgeries, ranging from prostate surgeries to even more complex brain surgeries, it is frightening – what about the human element that spices up health care? Are we gradually loosing it?
Scientists in developed countries are working tirelessly with nursing innovators to design robots that work on the finest AI algorithms to create mechanical nurses/caregivers that are envisioned to one day take up some clinical duties of registered nurses.
The arguments that exist tries to back up the concept that these robots will only do the less scientific duties of the registered nurses while allowing the Nurse to pay more attention to the overall care of the patient.
This is progress, but not without its obvious drawbacks and it’s positive sides, in the next part I will talk about the positive sides and what pioneers are doing in this seemingly new field of nursing/medical practice.
The Eminent Shortage of Professional Nurses.
It is surprising & also disturbing to know that despite the large numbers of registered nurses trained every year in different institutions around the world, there seems to be an avoidable and undefeatable shortage of these unique professionals.
Some countries now decide to train Nurse Assistants or “Unlicensed Assisting Personals” to help combat these shortage while on the other hand, in developing countries where the health care systems are not as developed as advanced countries, the private sector makes use of alternatives, auxiliaries, folks who are given basic nursing training as a sort of vocation training, scary and unhealthy, but these systems must survive, so they do what they must do, argument and improvise, though to the detriment of the health of millions who are exposed daily to the rough hands of these folks.
In the next article, I will talk about:
• The obvious benefits of Artificial Intelligence to health care.
• The obvious risks of Artificial intelligence to health care.
• Pioneers in the field of automated/robotic nursing.
Hope to hear your thoughts on this issue.
Thank you.
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