iPad face, robot body
December 2, 2011
Lesley Ciarula Taylor
STAFF REPORTER
Mt. Sinai’s Dr. Mirek Otremba is looking forward to having iRobot’s AVA puttering behind him with his iPad as he does his rounds.
“As a doctor, you don’t have enough pockets and hands,” the hospital’s infometrics committee physician liaison says.
Like a growing number of Mt. Sinai doctors, Otremba already has an iPad in his hands, which uses hospital-designed applications for clinical evaluation. The downtown Toronto hospital is a world leader in using mobile technology, but concerns about patient privacy, sterile environments and just not enough hands are slowing down universal acceptance, Otremba said.
AVA, a 5-foot-tall robot with an iPad head, is a little bit C3PO, a little bit Miss Moneypenny and a little bit Dr. House.
“We see this as a marriage of two technologies, mobile computing and robotics” said Colin Angle, chief executive officer of iRobot, the Massachusetts robotics company developing AVA.
IRobot, most famous for developing the Roomba vacuum cleaner, has just applied for a patent for AVA, their entry in the highly competitive world of telepresence robotics.
While winsome-looking beeping and scurrying robots that interface with your computer are already on the market, iRobot’s AVA will put an iPad face and brain on the droid’s navigational skills, microphones and speakers, lasers and senors.
Acting as a doctor’s consultant or assistant is a prime early focus for AVA, Angle said.
“I think it is brilliant,” Otremba. “I see an even greater utility if I can talk to it. It becomes a device that can follow you, almost like a team member.”
Mt. Sinai emergency room doctors, who need to be nimble and highly mobile, use iPads, he said. Otremba uses one in both his inpatient and outpatient work.
“In a hospital setting, it is two-fold. I can be reviewing patient information. And we are a teaching hospital. I can show things to my patients.”
iRobot has already signed an agreement with InTouch Health, a robotics company that specializes in remote medical conferencing: a doctor in one place, for example, talking to a hospital patient.
But Angle can also offer a range of possibilities, from the whimsical to the Jetson-like, for the project.
“I can project myself back home so I can interact with my wife and kids,” he said. “Or as opposed to a static portal, I can walk the line in a factory in China.”
Angle himself owns a “smart house” full of technology, he said, but sometimes he wants to avoid it all.
“This could be your data coming to get you. AVA could say, ‘Here’s a video call from so and so. Would you like to take it?’’
The three-wheeled, adjustable height robot could even notice a toilet seat in the house left up and hunt down the perpetrator, Angle said, or act as butler and drinks waiter at a party.
For an aging population, the robot could deliver medicine and a glass of water on schedule, instruct exercises, fetch things and provide security, he said. For a doctor or nurse, it could summon up data or another expert.
Angle declined to say when the robot would be available or how much it would cost, although he has already urged mobile application developers to consider AVA-specific apps. The robot would work with Android tablets as well as iPads.
Telepresence, he said, “is a world changing event for travel, business and the delivery of health care. It challenges the notion of what it means to be somewhere.”
Other telepresence robots on the market include Vgo Communications’s $5,000 VGO, which combines two-way audio and video with a robot, and the $15,000 Anybots, which Wired magazine described as a “self-propelled Skype-cam on a stick.”
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