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One in every of ABB’s healthcare initiatives was its partnership with XtalPi, the place it helped construct automated laboratory workstations. | Supply: ABB Robotics
With every passing 12 months, labor shortages and complexity improve for the healthcare business. From pharmacies to hospitals, companies are struggling to seek 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 Manual 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 immediately, logistics is the most important marketplace for robotics,” he stated throughout a MassRobotics webinar. “However there are new segments, and we consider that life sciences and healthcare is a brand new discipline for robotics.”
When ABB first began working with healthcare suppliers, the company already had years of expertise with the pharmaceutical business and medical system producers, stated Collados. Nonetheless, it wished to take a extra structured strategy.
So, ABB Robotics constructed a devoted group to find out what the healthcare business wanted, what processes may very well be modified, and the place it slot in.
“There are various alternatives. After all, we’re all conscious of surgical robots, that are wonderful expertise,” Collados stated. “However how, for ABB, for industrial firms, can we be related on this discipline?”
What’s driving automation within the healthcare business?
The healthcare business encompasses greater than hospital wards. It contains analysis, growth, and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, in addition to medical system design and manufacturing, to not point out the provision chain that serves services, staff, and in the end sufferers.
Click here to enlarge. Supply: MassRobotics
So, between all of those sides of the sector, there are lots of alternatives for robotics. Alternative, nevertheless, 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 now have an aged inhabitants, now we have the rising price of healthcare, and now we have extra superior healthcare, therapies, and personalised drugs. So, it’s getting extra complicated. There are extra selections that we have to make to deal with extra sufferers,” Collados stated. “On the identical time, the expertise is evolving.”
“There’s a want and a willingness from healthcare service firms to seek out options. So we consider that if we work collectively and we actually give attention to these drivers, we will have a greater service for all of us. And there are alternatives to enhance the system, we consider that robotics will be a part of that answer,” Collados continued.
ABB aids in pharmaceutical analysis
Collados highlighted a couple of ABB use instances to showcase robotics potential within the business. First, he checked out a latest project ABB accomplished with the Texas Medical Heart, Texas Youngsters’s Hospital, and Baylor College. At Texas Youngsters’s Hospital, researchers examine fruit flies, which share quite a lot 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 stated.
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, that 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 robot to flip these vials as an alternative.
“The problem in that mission was actually that the tools was not match for automation,” stated Collados. “So that you want a robotic that is ready to sense and really feel what it was touching, and we had been in a position to try this.”
In one other instance, ABB helped Boston-based XtalPi construct mobile manipulation workcells for its custom-built labs. XtalPi makes use of synthetic intelligence to speed up chemical analysis. Up to now, 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 check,” Collados stated. “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 worked with the Seventh Folks’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 individuals working within the pharmacy to have college coaching, and there are points in some hospitals,” Collados stated.
This new regulation has resulted in a scarcity of certified pharmacy staff. With out staff to fill prescriptions, individuals who want remedy might go with out essential care.
“On this case, we’re utilizing the FlexBuffer storage and retrieval system, which is taking packing containers exterior 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 choose the proper drug and separate the prescription for a sure affected person.”
Robotics suppliers should comprehend healthcare constraints
Whereas ABB sees numerous potential for robotics within the healthcare business, distributors want to grasp its constraints, stated Collados.
“We consider that as a way to be related on this business, we have to be very a lot conscious we’re working in a really delicate space,” he famous. “We have to have robots which have the proper preparation, the proper certification, and so they have to be suitable with the setting.”
As well as, ABB understands that automation continues 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 stated. “It’s a laboratory that may have one or two and perhaps many alternative purposes, and that job that the individuals are doing is just not centered on the automation.”
Editor’s notes: John Bubnikovich, president of ABB Robotics, might be taking part 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.
Applications are open for the newest cohort of the MassRobotics Healthcare Robotics Catalyst till Nov. 1.
