A hopeful future: How to make a medical robot "big white"

Editor's note: Author Li Mingming is the head of science and technology products, focus on intelligent home, family service robot and telemedicine robot product development, micro-signal: Paulaugust official website: www.spaceh.org

Disney's latest animated film, the Super Marine, describes an east-west-combined virtual city "old Jingshan" (San Fransokyo), combined with San Francisco and Tokyo. The story of 14-Year-old Hiro, a robot-savvy child prodigy and robot health aide, Baymax. However, I would like to say that the great White is not the ideal medical robot!

Disney's 2014 end of the movie can be said to be Hollywood's box office black, from a technical curtilage point of view, they hit the U.S. science and technology two hot spots: robotics and health care. The two markets are also hot in China's science and technology sector, with one forecast to reach 10 trillion in 2020 and one 8 trillion. The great White is not only perfect, but also close to realization. Next, I will tell you how to build.

First of all, simple analysis of the balloon shell is some children to, but carbon fiber skeleton, cute design, with speech recognition and human body signs scanning ability, these are very reasonable and mainstream design. The Great White is a collection of three science and technology industries: Mobile Medicine, robotic manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

First, mobile medical.

Now it is commonly called health. At the 2010 Mobile Healthcare Summit in the United States, a definition of health was made-to provide medical services through mobile devices. In this way, the robot that will move is very large and does conform to this definition.

The first full name of mobile medical English is "emerging mobile communication and receptacle technologies for healthcare", translated as "new mobile communication and network technology in healthcare industry". Therefore, the rise of mobile medicine, the first fundamental reason is the development and popularization of communication and network technology, cost reduction, equipment popularization, especially the large number of smart phone deployment, only the outbreak of mobile medicine. At present, mobile medicine is still in the middle of the development of communication technology dividend.

Logically speaking, the popularity of mobile devices has contributed to the mobile medical industry. Whether the robot industry is mature is the indicator of when it was made. Then I can confidently tell you that the white is not far away from us. A 24-hour doctor-nurse is extremely expensive, but instead of a robotic health assistant, the cost is indeed surprisingly low.

Both the United States and Japan are doing it, and each has its own feature of making medical robots.

American and Japanese medical robot case

United States

Touch health--, the veteran mobile medical company, has achieved the interconnection of 10,000 communities and clinics in the United States. Their strategic investors, irobot, the top American robotics company, built a series of robotic touch Tiyatien, what they call a telemedicine robot.

These robots can play the role of Doctor surrogates in community hospitals, patients ' homes, wards and other places. A doctor Who remotely controls a robot can track the life of a patient for a long time, monitor his/her life habits and provide a more thorough course of treatment.

In addition, digital Tiyatien, the top five health care agency in the United States, is also making its own telemedicine robot.

The U.S. Army's telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center commissioned the Massachusetts Robotics company Vecna developed an automated battlefield rescue technology that eventually evolved into a battlefield assisted evacuation robot (bear) to achieve rescue, transport, and other rescue functions.

Japan

twendy-one--the robot invented by early Rice Tana in Japan differs from the touch Tiyatien telemedicine, the most important goal of Twendy-one is to simulate human caregivers. The robot's hand is a strong imitation of human beings, in the initial demonstration can pick up the habit, squeeze ketchup, is expected to be put into use in 2015, to care for the elderly and patients. The drawback is that the price is expensive--around 30 million yen.

Toyota-in 2011, 4 robots were released in the field of medical care to help people who were not able to move because of lower extremity paralysis, including "independent Walking Assistants", "Walking Practice assistants", "balancing exercise assistants", "helping to move assistants". "With the increasing number of children and aging, the robot for nursing and medical care will become more and more important," said Manichi, Toyota's director of special affairs.

Yaskawa-A rehabilitation robot was released in 2014 to assist patients in limb rehabilitation. However, their products, more of the original rehabilitation equipment automation, more in line with ergonomic, improve the care efficiency.

hal--Japan Zhubo University Enterprise Cyberdyne product HAL (Hybrid assistive Limb) is the world's first as a wearable power system through the ISO13482 certified equipment, its medical improvement is as a medical equipment passed the EU CE certification. It is designed to help patients with lower limb muscle atrophy, when you want to stand up, walk, stop, lift your legs up and down the stairs, it will be appropriate to help you finish.

You can call Hal a wearable robot, and from the initials you can see the salute to Kubrick's 2001 space roaming, the robot in that movie is called HAL.

Creating Artificial Intelligence

How strong is the artificial intelligence of a medical robot? It may be that sci-fi movies have too many imaginations for AI, from the King of Extinction to the Jude of the near perfect human in artificial intelligence. But in fact, artificial intelligence has long been in everyone's life, these detailed design "software" is designed to help you improve efficiency. Perhaps the current medical robot's artificial intelligence can not replace the doctor, but there must be a way to make you healthier.

The biggest task is to scan target users, perceive their physical signs, health data and emotions through cameras and other devices, and then take action on health care. In the animation, the protagonist Ahom two times by the great white hug, once because his brother died, the mood of the depression was a great white scan to; White also adjusts its own temperature to increase Ahom's body temperature. Think this is like nest? In fact, Nest is the internet of things, artificial intelligence and robots are Google Fancy and acquired.

Here I organize a number of companies that can make great white products.

jibo--, a representative of home applications, is less intelligent than DeepMind and IBM's Watson, but they have an important function-voice interaction and emotion recognition. Jibo systems use NLP to understand commands and even daily conversations. The ability to identify users and their families, and to interact with each other through different users, and to identify the emotional differences between users.

nest--from the American use of thermostat habits, can learn the user's sensitivity to the temperature, through the network of things around the ambient temperature changes, to adjust all connected to the Nest equipment, so as to achieve the user like room temperature, humidity and so on.

deepmind--This is the name of the AI company acquired by Google after acquiring Nest, who has been merged into Google's oldest search group and given the task of doing knowledge. Is it big? That's because DeepMind's deep learning algorithms have allowed their AI to learn, before at CES they showed DeepMind how to "play" a whole new game. A doctor teaches a few times, his robot will be able to diagnose and treat, this future looks good?

Robot Vision

In addition to satisfying the automation of artificial intelligence, the ability to scan the human body is also essential, and such a black technology in reality is a reference, which is recently taken out HoloLens such fetish of Microsoft. Their Kinect one (the computer version, the Kinect V2, which is abbreviated as KINECT2), rivals in the perennial Diaoda depth camera field, is the best visual device in the world.

kinect2--Microsoft chose Tof to replace the structural light (Kinect1 technology). Muscle stretching, body temperature, and heart rate are now recognizable-all the data needed for health care. The principle of realization, with temperature and inflammation to a simple example, is by intercepting the body surface color, to identify its temperature, accuracy is still evolving.

There are also domestic teams in the use of ordinary cameras and OPENCV related technology to accomplish similar tasks-point Kang Technology claimed to be able to use the camera to measure blood pressure technology, but the author did not verify the field.

What do we do?

As a pioneering team in the field of Home Service robotics and tele-medical robotics, we are now based on the Open source Ros (robotic system), which produces two kinds of nursing robots, mainly for children and the elderly. The core functionality is similar to the touch Tiyatien, which is remote control.

In addition, in order to allow the target user group to accept the robot, we put the bionic pressure sensor and the natural language synthesis chip in the robot, so the robot can feel at least 10 levels of stroking, and gives the interaction. Combined with natural language processing system, the robot can synthesize the familiar voice of the user instead of the robot voice, so as to read the function of text information and voice interaction. For example, a poor eyesight of the elderly, you can synthesize his children's voice, for the elderly to read text messages, reminding her to take medicine and so on.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)