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Considered 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 seek 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 can assist remedy these issues.
Whereas there are a lot of rising industries for robotics, together with meals service and retail, healthcare is especially promising, famous Jose Handbook 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 biggest marketplace for robotics,” he stated throughout a MassRobotics webinar. “However there are new segments, and we imagine 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 gadget producers, stated Collados. Nonetheless, it wished to take a extra structured method.
So, ABB Robotics constructed a devoted workforce to find out what the healthcare trade wanted, what processes may very well be modified, and the place it slot in.
“There are various alternatives. In fact, we’re all conscious of surgical robots, that are superb expertise,” 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 contains analysis, growth, and manufacturing of prescription drugs, in addition to medical gadget design and manufacturing, to not point out the provision chain that serves services, employees, and in the end sufferers.
Click on right here to enlarge. Supply: MassRobotics
So, between all of those sides of the sector, there are a lot 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.
“We now have an aged inhabitants, we’ve the rising price of healthcare, and we’ve extra superior healthcare, remedies, and customized drugs. So, it’s getting extra advanced. There are extra decisions that we have to make to deal with extra sufferers,” Collados stated. “On the similar time, the expertise is evolving.”
“There’s a want and a willingness from healthcare service firms to seek 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 instances to showcase robotics potential within the trade. First, he checked out a latest undertaking ABB accomplished with the Texas Medical Heart, Texas Kids’s Hospital, and Baylor College. At Texas Kids’s Hospital, researchers research 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 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 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 robotic to flip these vials as an alternative.
“The problem in that undertaking 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 cell 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.
“Through the use of robots, automation, and the AI mind, it was in a position to cut back the time of the chemical stability take a look at,” Collados stated. “For this drug, it will 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 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 stated.
This new regulation has resulted in a scarcity of certified pharmacy employees. With out employees to fill prescriptions, individuals who want medicine may go with out essential care.
“On this case, we’re utilizing the FlexBuffer storage and retrieval system, which is taking containers 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 choose the suitable 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 imagine that to be able 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 suitable preparation, the suitable certification, and so they should be suitable 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 unit that has 2,000 robots,” Collados stated. “It’s a laboratory that can have one or two and perhaps many various functions, and that job that the individuals are doing shouldn’t be centered on the automation.”
Editor’s notes: John Bubnikovich, president of ABB Robotics, will probably be taking part 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.
Functions are open for the third cohort of the Massrobotics Healthcare Robotics Catalyst till Nov. 1.
