ABB discusses the evolving position of robotics in healthcare

By Brianna Wessling & Eugene Demaitre | September 20, 2024 The Robotic Report

With every passing 12 months, labor shortages and complexity enhance for the healthcare business. From pharmacies to hospitals, companies are struggling to search out and maintain certified staff. On the identical time, advances in analysis imply that laboratory and medical procedures require better velocity and precision. ABB Robotics asserted this week that robotics and automation may help resolve these issues. 

Whereas there are lots of rising industries for robotics, together with meals service and retail, healthcare is especially promising, famous Jose Guide Collados, service robotics product line supervisor at ABB. 

“Some years in the past, we already noticed that we’ve been main the revolution of logistics with the Amazons and on-line commerce. And at present, logistics is the biggest marketplace for robotics,” he mentioned throughout a MassRobotics webinar. “However there are new segments, and we consider that life sciences and healthcare is a brand new subject for robotics.”

When ABB first began working with healthcare suppliers, the firm already had years of expertise with the pharmaceutical business and medical machine producers, mentioned Collados. Nevertheless, it wished to take a extra structured strategy.

So, ABB Robotics constructed a devoted staff to find out what the healthcare business wanted, what processes might be modified, and the place it slot in.

“There are lots of alternatives. After all, we’re all conscious of surgical robots, that are wonderful expertise,” Collados mentioned. “However how, for ABB, for industrial corporations, can we be related on this subject?”

What’s driving automation within the healthcare business?

The healthcare business encompasses greater than hospital wards. It contains analysis, improvement, and manufacturing of prescription drugs, in addition to medical machine design and manufacturing, to not point out the provision chain that serves services, staff, and in the end sufferers.

Click on right here to enlarge. Supply: MassRobotics

So, between all of those aspects of the sector, there are lots of alternatives for robotics. Alternative, nonetheless, isn’t sufficient to get robots out into the world. Collados additionally recognized a number of drivers pushing the healthcare business to think about automation. 

“We’ve got an aged inhabitants, we now have the rising value of healthcare, and we now have extra superior healthcare, remedies, and personalised drugs. So, it’s getting extra advanced. There are extra decisions that we have to make to deal with extra sufferers,” Collados mentioned. “On the identical time, the expertise is evolving.”

“There’s a want and a willingness from healthcare service corporations to search out options. So we consider that if we work collectively and we actually deal with these drivers, we can have a greater service for all of us. And there are alternatives to enhance the system, we consider that robotics could be a part of that resolution,” Collados continued.

ABB aids in pharmaceutical analysis

Collados highlighted a couple of ABB use circumstances to showcase robotics potential within the business. First, he checked out a current challenge ABB accomplished with the Texas Medical Heart, Texas Youngsters’s Hospital, and Baylor College. At Texas Youngsters’s Hospital, researchers research fruit flies, which share an excessive amount of DNA with people. 

“Trying into fruit flies, we will perceive the impact of various genes or how cerebral palsy can have an effect on genetic illnesses like Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s illness,” Collados mentioned.

To maintain these flies alive whereas finding out them, researchers want to maneuver them into new vials containing meals each 30 days. A typical lab maintains round 20,000 vials, which means researchers spend 20% of a workday “flipping flies” by inserting a vial containing the fly inventory over a vial with recent meals, after which tapping it to drop the flies.

ABB created an automatic workstation that includes its dual-arm YuMi collaborative robotic to flip these vials as a substitute. 

“The problem in that challenge was actually that the tools was not match for automation,” mentioned Collados. “So that you want a robotic that is ready to sense and really feel what it was touching, and we have been ready to do this.”

In one other instance, ABB helped Boston-based XtalPi construct cellular manipulation workcells for its custom-built labs. XtalPi makes use of synthetic intelligence to speed up chemical analysis. Previously, it labored with Pfizer on the Paxlovid COVID-19 vaccine, amongst different tasks.

“By utilizing robots, automation, and the AI mind, it was capable of cut back the time of the chemical stability take a look at,” Collados mentioned. “For this drug, it could usually take six months. They did it in two weeks.”

Robotics for pharmacy success

ABB additionally sees potential in utilizing robots to hurry up healthcare logistics. For instance, the corporate has labored with the Seventh Individuals’s Hospital in Shanghai, the place its robots are serving to to fill pharmacy orders.

“In China, there’s a new regulation that’s requiring the folks working within the pharmacy to have college coaching, and there are points in some hospitals,” Collados mentioned.

This new regulation has resulted in a scarcity of certified pharmacy staff. With out staff to fill prescriptions, individuals who want remedy may go with out essential care. 

“On this case, we’re utilizing the FlexBuffer storage and retrieval system, which is taking containers outdoors of the storage system and in entrance of that robotic that has merchandise picker software program,” Collados defined. “That is 3D imaginative and prescient mixed with AI, and one other IRB 2600 ABB robotic is ready to decide the appropriate drug and separate the prescription for a sure affected person.”

Robotics suppliers should comprehend healthcare constraints

Whereas ABB sees plenty of potential for robotics within the healthcare business, distributors want to grasp its constraints, mentioned Collados. 

“We consider that with a purpose to be related on this business, we must be very a lot conscious we’re working in a really delicate space,” he famous. “We have to have robots which have the appropriate preparation, the appropriate certification, they usually must be suitable with the atmosphere.”

As well as, ABB understands that automation remains to be new to many healthcare staff. This implies any expertise that may make robots simpler to make use of and perceive, like AI, might be key to implementation. 

“We’re coming into environments the place it’s not an automotive manufacturing unit that has 2,000 robots,” Collados mentioned. “It’s a laboratory that can have one or two and possibly many various functions, and that job that the individuals are doing shouldn’t be centered on the automation.”

Editor’s notes: John Bubnikovich, president of ABB Robotics, might be collaborating in a keynote panel on “Driving the Way forward for Robotics Innovation” at RoboBusiness 2024, which might be on Oct. 16 and 17 in Santa Clara, Calif.

RoboBusiness might be co-located with DeviceTalks West, which focuses on medical gadgets.

Purposes are open for the most recent cohort of the MassRobotics Healthcare Robotics Catalyst till Nov. 1.