Robotic Deployment Issues

Deployment of complete health robotics systems requires practical issues of reliable, safe and continuous operation in human environments. The systems must be private and secure, and interoperable with other systems in the home. To move from incremental progress to system level implications, the medical field and heath robotics needs new principled measurement tools and methods for efficient demonstration, evaluation and certification.

The challenge of system evaluation is compounded by the nature of the problem: evaluating human function and behavior as part of the system itself. Quantitative characterization of pathology is an existing problem in medicine; robotics has the potential to contribute to solving this problem by enabling methods for the analysis and collection of quantitative data about human function and behavior. Some health care delivery is inherently qualitative in nature, motivation, having to do with therapy social interaction at the same time; while such methods are standard in the social sciences, they are not recognized or accepted by the medical community. Because medical and health robotics must work with both trained specialists and lay users, it is necessary to gain acceptance from both communities.

This necessities reproducibility of experiments, code reuse, standards, hardware platform re-use/sharing, sufficient data for claims of efficacy, clinical trial and moving robots from lab to real world. As systems become increasingly intelligent and autonomous, it is necessary to develop methods for measuring and evaluating adaptive technologies that change with the interaction with the user.

Affordability of robotic technology must be addressed at several different levels. The hospital pays a significant cost in terms of capital investment to acquire a robot, the maintenance costs are high, and the developing cost of robots is immense, given their complexity and stringent performance requirements foe medical applications. Policies are needed to address regulatory barriers, the licensure issue and state by state certification, rules for proctoring and teaching with robots, and reimbursement via insurance companies.