Sensitive skin!

The news today is covering a great deal about the US developments at both Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley on artificial skin experiments, as published in the journal "Nature Materials". Such a skin could in future form the coving for robot limbs, whether for stand-alone robots or for prosthetics for humans that need replacement body parts. Robots with sensitive skin like this could literally feel the objects they manipulate, allowing them to work with more fragile items, for example.

Both approaches demonstrate yet another area which could be impacted by nano-scale technology in a few years time. Engineering pressure sensors into special conductive rubber materials at such a microscopic level is just one of a huge potential number of ways that nano-technology could enable. The two approaches use Thin Film Transistors (TFTs) which previously have been utilised in computer display technology.

At the moment this is lab-based experimentation but the teams working on it have also identified a fairly low cost method for industrialising the manufacture of such materials. In the future, artificial skin will not only look like real human skin, but also allow machines to sense the feel of the materials they come into contact with. Once such developments are brought together with other robotic advances, the total capability of robots as we understand them today will be revolutionised.

Information = power?

Many organisations today are actually very good when it comes to targeting their marketing information at you and me. Much of what drops through the door is now a product of careful computer-run analyses and increasingly relevant to the recipient. In the future there will be scope for organisations to do this analysis in real time when the customer presents themselves. In the same way, consumers will not need to price-compare the night before they go shopping next day. Instead the consumer will also be able to do an analysis of the product they are interested in, in real time in front of the shop assistant. The richness of the dialogue between customer and sales person will need to be much more to negotiate the deal. These are just a couple of ways that information will result in a different power balance between those who are taking part in retail transactions.

In addition the shop may know when a customer with one of their loyalty cards is passing near the store in a particular mall. And likewise, the customer may be notified when in the mall of special deals on items they have bought before they enter a particular shop. So presence and location will also be important information.

Some information that is available is currently held by third parties will be available to the rightful owners. At the moment your doctor probably holds your health records, although in theory you might argue that they are your personal property. The ownership of new information, not currently available to people may be especially tricky to assign.

The way we regard, share, assign ownership to, and use information in the future will be crucial. And privacy is another story completely!

Care for a robot, anyone?

As I have mentioned many times in this blog, the demographic forecasts of the future tell us that we won't have enough people to look after all the people who need looking after in the decades to come.  This suggests that more machine support will be employed, and I suspect specifically robotic machines.  Clearly there are potential advantages for health professionals including addressing the increasing risk that they injure themselves when physically moving heavy patients, as obesity levels rise.  But would you ever relate to a robot as you would to a human nurse for example?  How much supervision of robots looking after people would be needed?  What is the potential cost of malfunction?  If your human nurse gets a bug, it may spread a disease (possibly life threatening) around a ward.  If your robot nurse has a bug it may kill you too.  

Robots I have met, are increasingly able to empathise with the humans around them.  They can detect emotional states of people and be programmed to act accordingly.  Some of the tactile movements now possible with robots can make them a very sensitive and gentle assistant compared to the images most people carry of large industrial automobile welding robots.  What type of robot would be best in a caring application?  Would you prefer a machine that looks like a human or that doesn't caring for you?   And it's not just about healthcare, maybe you would be comfortable with a robot that looks after your children when you are not around?  It would have a better idea of what they are doing on the Internet than you, and would be able to answer any questions they have from an educational viewpoint.   As the technology becomes available in future, we will all need to make more decisions about what we can accept.  

Mobile healthcare ...

We will need machines to look after people more in future.  I have covered many times the idea of robots helping to look after people when the demographics mean that there aren't enough humans to do it.  But in the developing world, the machinery is less likely to be robotic.  Mobile phone credit already provides a trusted currency in parts of Africa in particular.  There are many more mobile phones than hospital beds in those developing areas, and these may provide the initial technology to offer healthcare in the pocket.  Such devices can be used to remind patients to take medication and get vaccinations.  They can also be used to notify people when epidemics are taking place and help model the spread of infections.  Mobile phones already do many things which people never intended the first such machines to do; healthcare may be one more of these things.  

Fit for Success

In a previous posting here, I recently described my second impressions of the Wii games console from Nintendo.  Although impressed with the amount of effort required to play the sports games at a consistently high level, my wife and I have yet to feel the urge to invest in the Wii Balance Board in order to get even more exercise in front of the big screen!  But in the harder economic times, Nintendo is introducing  My Fitness Coach, which offers a similar fitness regime without any additional hardware necessary.  The success of Wii Fit is being cleverly followed up.  

In future, we will have many options for machines around the home that promote good healthy activity and allow us to monitor our condition.  This will be followed by nano-technology lab-on-chip devices that can live inside the body giving an even better indication of what is happening to us.  So perhaps its not such a bad idea that people are getting used to a health and fitness programme from a machine in their lounge?

IET Annual Healthcare Lecture

It was a pleasure to deliver the keynote presentation at this year's IET Healthcare lecture at the organisation's headquarters in Savoy Place, London this evening.  It was also my pleasure to give out some prizes to the leading students recognised by the organisation before starting to speak.  

So what if your ageing relatives are cared for by robots?  And what if the only way to control a pandemic outbreak was to chip and track humans?  And what if your surgeon told you he wasn't going to be in the room with you when he carries out your operation?   These are all topics which I mentioned as part of glimpsing the future on this particular occasion.  

The questions afterwards were very good, understandably given the calibre of the audience present!   But the most interesting part for me as always, was the discussion over dinner where I could hear from some of the audience about their views and their work.  

Healthcare in 7 minutes?

General practitioners (GPs) and family doctors have on average about seven minutes for the consultation with each patient who visits them, within the National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom.  These GPs are increasingly being offered more technology support in their work, more complex drugs to prescribe, and more options for followup treatments.  The future vision for healthcare often points towards more individual care, more targeted prescriptions and drugs for each patient.  Biotechnology marches on towards such a vision.  It is difficult to align these two things.  It is difficult to see how even the best doctors will cope with an even more complex world with so little time available to them.  I wonder if more intelligent pre-briefing of patient records will even scratch the surface in respect of making their task any easier.

Robot pets and healthcare

Demographics tell us that in the future there will be an ageing population.  There won't be enough young fit people to look after sick and elderly people in future.  We will need machines to play a bigger part in healthcare.  We already do this with little concern in hospitals, where machines commonly keep people alive and provide for critical functions in cases where the body is unable to do so.  Of course in hospitals we expect those machines to be operated by skilled consultants and practitioners.  Increasingly we will see technology tasked with health monitoring and care in people's homes.  

The machines in homes can be made more personal than those in hospital.  An elderly person may be looked after by a robotic pet, while believing that they are in fact looking after the pet.  Such a robot may monitor physiological characteristics of the person, or analyse daily routines, or how often medication is taken.  They may alert the person or signal others outside the home if such monitoring detects an abnormal or unusual pattern of behaviour.   I don't mind if my mother-in-law is looked after by a robot; my wife has a slightly different view!  The technology is arriving before people are comfortable with its uses.  As attitudes change, more will be done by robotic healthcare solutions.