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Certainly one of ABB’s healthcare initiatives was its partnership with XtalPi, the place it helped construct automated laboratory workstations. | Supply: ABB Robotics
With every passing yr, labor shortages and complexity enhance for the healthcare trade. From pharmacies to hospitals, companies are struggling to search out and hold certified employees. On the similar time, advances in analysis imply that laboratory and medical procedures require larger velocity and precision. ABB Robotics asserted this week that robotics and automation may also help clear up these issues.
Whereas there are numerous 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 as we speak, logistics is the most important marketplace for robotics,” he mentioned throughout a MassRobotics webinar. “However there are new segments, and we imagine that life sciences and healthcare is a brand new discipline for robotics.”
When ABB first began working with healthcare suppliers, the firm already had years of expertise with the pharmaceutical trade and medical machine producers, mentioned Collados. Nonetheless, it needed to take a extra structured method.
So, ABB Robotics constructed a devoted group to find out what the healthcare trade wanted, what processes might be modified, and the place it slot in.
“There are numerous alternatives. After all, we’re all conscious of surgical robots, that are superb expertise,” Collados mentioned. “However how, for ABB, for industrial firms, can we be related on this discipline?”
What’s driving automation within the healthcare trade?
The healthcare trade encompasses greater than hospital wards. It contains analysis, growth, and manufacturing of prescribed drugs, in addition to medical machine design and manufacturing, to not point out the availability chain that serves amenities, employees, and finally sufferers.
Click on right here to enlarge. Supply: MassRobotics
So, between all of those aspects of the sector, there are numerous 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 trade to think about automation.
“We’ve an aged inhabitants, we’ve got the rising price of healthcare, and we’ve got extra superior healthcare, remedies, and personalised drugs. So, it’s getting extra complicated. There are extra selections that we have to make to deal with extra sufferers,” Collados mentioned. “On the similar time, the expertise is evolving.”
“There’s a want and a willingness from healthcare service firms to search out options. So we imagine that if we work collectively and we actually give attention to these drivers, we can have a greater service for all of us. And there are alternatives to enhance the system, we imagine that robotics may be a part of that resolution,” Collados continued.
ABB aids in pharmaceutical analysis
Collados highlighted a number of ABB use circumstances to showcase robotics potential within the trade. First, he checked out a latest venture ABB accomplished with the Texas Medical Middle, Texas Kids’s Hospital, and Baylor College. At Texas Kids’s Hospital, researchers examine fruit flies, which share an excessive amount of DNA with people.
“Wanting into fruit flies, we will perceive the impact of various genes or how cerebral palsy can have an effect on genetic ailments 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 putting 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 an alternative.
“The problem in that venture was actually that the gear 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 had been ready to try 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. Prior to now, it labored with Pfizer on the Paxlovid COVID-19 vaccine, amongst different initiatives.
“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 achievement
ABB additionally sees potential in utilizing robots to hurry up healthcare logistics. For instance, the corporate has labored 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 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 employees. With out employees to fill prescriptions, individuals who want treatment may 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 decide the appropriate drug and separate the prescription for a sure affected person.”
Robotics suppliers should comprehend healthcare constraints
Whereas ABB sees a whole lot of potential for robotics within the healthcare trade, distributors want to know its constraints, mentioned Collados.
“We imagine that with a view to be related on this trade, we should 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, and so they should be appropriate with the atmosphere.”
As well as, ABB understands that automation remains to be new to many healthcare employees. This implies any expertise that may make robots simpler to make use of and perceive, like AI, will probably be key to implementation.
“We’re coming into environments the place it’s not an automotive manufacturing facility that has 2,000 robots,” Collados mentioned. “It’s a laboratory that can have one or two and possibly many alternative purposes, and that job that the individuals are doing isn’t targeted on the automation.”
Editor’s notes: John Bubnikovich, president of ABB Robotics, will probably be collaborating in a keynote panel on “Driving the Way forward for Robotics Innovation” at RoboBusiness 2024, which will probably be on Oct. 16 and 17 in Santa Clara, Calif.
RoboBusiness will probably be co-located with DeviceTalks West, which focuses on medical gadgets.
Purposes are open for the newest cohort of the MassRobotics Healthcare Robotics Catalyst till Nov. 1.
