Growing market
Robots for the healthcare sector
The technology group ABB wants to equip medical laboratories with collaborative robots. The technology will initially be used in a health care hub on the innovation campus of the Texas Medical Center (TMC) in Houston, Texas, which ABB plans to open in October 2019.
The lab is ABB's first facility specifically for healthcare research. ABB's research team will work with medical professionals, scientists and engineers at the TMC campus to develop medical robotic systems for non-surgical applications. This includes laboratory logistics and next-generation automated laboratory technologies.
Relief for repetitive tasks
Nowadays, highly qualified medical professionals spend a large part of their working day on repetitive and unchallenging tasks. This severely limits the number of patients that can be treated. By using robots for these tasks, medical professionals can focus on more demanding and productive work. At the same time, testing procedures are accelerated, allowing significantly more patients to be treated.
ABB has analyzed a wide range of medical processes that are currently performed manually in laboratories. ABB estimates that the number of tests performed each year could be increased by 50 percent through automation. By having robots take over repetitive tasks, it is also possible to automate activities that are associated with a high health risk for staff, such as repetitive strain injury syndrome.
Considerable market
According to an internal study by ABB, the global market is set to grow to almost 60,000 medical robots for non-surgical applications by 2025. This means that the market will almost quadruple compared to 2018
ABB's collaborative robots are already used in food and beverage laboratories around the world and are suitable for medical facilities as they can work safely and efficiently side-by-side with humans without the need for safety fences. The robots will perform repetitive, difficult and time-consuming tasks of various kinds. Among other things, they will dose, mix and pipette, assemble sterile instruments and load and unload centrifuges. dsc
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