Abstract
This article offers a brief overview of most current and potential uses and applications of robotics in health/care and social care, whether commercially ready and available on the market or still at the various stages of research and prototyping. We provide carefully hand-picked examples and pointers to on-going research for each set of identified robotics applications and then discuss the main ingredients for the success of these applications, as well as the main issues surrounding their adoption for everyday use, including sustainability in non-technical environments, patient/user safety and acceptance, ethical considerations such as patient/user privacy, and cost effectiveness. We examine how robotics could (partially) fill in some of the identified gaps in current telehealthcare and home care/self-care provisions. The article concludes with a brief glimpse at a couple of emerging developments and promising applications in the field (soft robots and robots for disaster response) that are expected to play important roles in the future.
Highlights
Robots serving various tasks and purposes in the medical/health and social care sectors beyond the traditional scope of surgical and rehabilitation robots are poised to become one of the most importantRobotics 2014, 3 technological innovations of the 21st century
We provide carefully hand-picked examples and pointers to on-going research for each set of identified robotics applications and discuss the main ingredients for the success of these applications, as well as the main issues surrounding their adoption for everyday use
The range of robotic applications that are available for these latter domains is extremely vast, diverse and continually growing all the time, from robots used in minimally invasive robot-assisted surgery and in rehabilitation, to robots designed to function in hospitals/care homes and personal robots serving as motivational coaches or assisting older people with housework and domestic chores
Summary
We offer a brief but rather comprehensive overview of most of the current and potential uses and applications of robotics in health/care and social care. We provide carefully hand-picked examples and pointers to on-going research for each set of identified robotics applications and discuss the main ingredients for the success of these applications, as well as the main issues surrounding their adoption for everyday use. We examine how robotics could partially fill in some of the identified gaps in current telehealthcare and home care/self-care provisions. We conclude with a brief glimpse at a couple of emerging developments and promising applications in the field that are expected to play important roles in the future. 2. Overview and Classification of Current and Potential Robotics Applications in Health/Care and Social Care
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