A pillar of health reform is enhancing the access to a
better health care for more people. Technology affects the cost and
increasingly potent means to connect clinics in the vast and medically
underserved rural regions of the United States with big city medical centers
and their specialists. Telemedicine is well established as a tool for triage
and assessment in emergencies, but new medical robots are
one step ahead—they can now patrol hospital hallways on more routine rounds, checking on patients in different rooms and managing their
individual charts and vital signs without direct human intervention. The
RP-VITA Remote Presence Robot produced jointly by iRobot
Corp. and InTouch Health is the first such autonomous
navigation remote-presence robot to receive FDA clearance for hospital use. The
device is a mobile cart with a two-way video screen and medical monitoring
equipment, programmed to maneuver through the busy halls of a hospital.
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