Lance Winslow asked:




Wouldn’t it be great to have the perfect friend, but what if your best friend was not human or a dog? What if your best friend was an artificially intelligent android robot? You can order your robotic android with a personality and pleasing facial features. Only one problem with robots they never get old, but you will!

As you get older you will want your robotic companion to also get older and perhaps get upgrades. You will also want it to move slower, talk slower and react slower to fit your delicate human aging. Indeed, the robot when it goes in for repairs, upgrades or new systems, perhaps you will wish to adjust its personality and facial features.

For those researchers, scientists and designers of consumer based electronic artificially intelligent robotic androids; they will need to be acutely aware of the needs of the marketplace. Humans do not stay young forever, thus neither can their companion and domestic family robots.

Aging wrinkles and sagging facial features must be added in all standard equipment for all domestic family robots and personal companion androids. Change into hair to gray is the easy part, but adjusting the program to mimic a person and old age may be quite another issue and perhaps a challenge for robotic designers. Consider this in 2006.

Roboticists

U. Akinci asked:




Another “health automation” area in which machines are rapidly replacing human labor is the transportation of various goods around a hospital to the nursing stations. It is a thankless and physically demanding job that needs to be taken care of, day-in day-out. Perhaps robots will save our nurses from such physical drudgery and allow them to concentrate on more technical and “higher value added” assignments – despite the ever-present “labor displacement” potential that all machines represent.

Japan is probably one country leading the way in the employment of robots in all kinds of hospital services including an “android” robot meeting the visitors at the greeting area and showing them the way to wherever they want to go around the hospital compound.

There are porter robots in Japanese hospitals which carry food trays as well as mail, paperwork, luggage, lab specimens, bandages, X-rays, blankets and linens.

The initial investment could be considerable for some of these hi-tech workers but they do not eat or drink, and they usually take only a six-hour break per day. They do not go out on vacation. They do not take any sick leave or personal days off. . Neither do they need any promotion or health insurance.

According to the Pittsburgh-based Aethon corporation which makes some of these porter robots, they cost 30% less than a human courier. There is one (named “Chad”) in use at the Lehigh Valley Hospital in Pennsylvania and another one will soon be rolling down the corridors of The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Aeton has 150 porter robots operating in various U.S. hospitals — 120 robots more than employed back only two years ago. The adoption rate is alarming for the human couriers but sweet music to hi-tech companies like Aeton.

Some of these robots have a TV camera installed on them so that a doctor can “visit” and “examine” a patient by remote control. Thanks to the radio frequency chips that nowadays can be affixed to almost any object, these robots can also go and find left over or lost equipment around the hospital. Given the fact that a 500-bed hospital on the average has 1,500 IV pumps, for example, the savings of such a capability can be considerable in the long run.

Hi-Tech Future and Constant Education


Robots, whether used in delicate surgery or just to carry goods around the hospital, are here to stay. This trend will eventually both present new challenges for some of our nurses as well as prove them with new and exciting venues to ratchet their credentials to new heights of professional excellence. That’s why in our hi-tech future, the education and on-the-job training of our nurses will be more important than in any other period in history.

Robomediation