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One in all 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 trade. From pharmacies to hospitals, companies are struggling to search out and preserve certified staff. On the similar time, advances in analysis imply that laboratory and medical procedures require larger pace and precision. ABB Robotics asserted this week that robotics and automation might help clear up 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 the moment, logistics is the biggest 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 subject 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, stated Collados. Nonetheless, it needed to take a extra structured method.
So, ABB Robotics constructed a devoted workforce to find out what the healthcare trade 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 superb know-how,” Collados stated. “However how, for ABB, for industrial firms, can we be related on this subject?”
What’s driving automation within the healthcare trade?
The healthcare trade encompasses greater than hospital wards. It consists of analysis, improvement, and manufacturing of prescribed drugs, in addition to medical machine design and manufacturing, to not point out the availability chain that serves amenities, staff, and finally sufferers.
Click on right 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 trade to think about automation.
“Now we have an aged inhabitants, we have now the rising value of healthcare, and we have now 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 stated. “On the similar time, the know-how is evolving.”
“There’s a want and a willingness from healthcare service firms to search out options. So we consider 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 consider that robotics could be a part of that answer,” Collados continued.
ABB aids in pharmaceutical analysis
Collados highlighted just a few ABB use circumstances to showcase robotics potential within the trade. First, he checked out a current venture 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 a substantial amount of DNA with people.
“Trying into fruit flies, we are able to 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, 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 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 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 initiatives.
“By utilizing robots, automation, and the AI mind, it was capable of scale back the time of the chemical stability check,” Collados stated. “For this drug, it will 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 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 may go with out essential care.
“On this case, we’re utilizing the FlexBuffer storage and retrieval system, which is taking bins 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 precise drug and separate the prescription for a sure affected person.”
Robotics suppliers should comprehend healthcare constraints
Whereas ABB sees loads of potential for robotics within the healthcare trade, distributors want to know its constraints, stated Collados.
“We consider that so as 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 precise preparation, the precise certification, they usually should be appropriate with the surroundings.”
As well as, ABB understands that automation continues to be new to many healthcare staff. This implies any know-how that may make robots simpler to make use of and perceive, like AI, shall 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 persons are doing isn’t centered on the automation.”
Editor’s notes: John Bubnikovich, president of ABB Robotics, shall be taking part in a keynote panel on “Driving the Way forward for Robotics Innovation” at RoboBusiness 2024, which shall be on Oct. 16 and 17 in Santa Clara, Calif.
RoboBusiness shall 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.
