Healthcare needs more people and help from robots. In Denmark, the robotics industry is developing much-needed solutions
As industrial robots have done in the last decade, healthcare robots will develop explosively in the next few years. This development is driven by labour shortages in nursing and healthcare personnel across Europe and by a growing population of older people. This is why Odense – Europe’s robotics city – is firmly focussed on the interplay between healthcare and new technologies. During this month, experts and professionals gathered in Odense at Week of Health and Innovation, a two-day international knowledge festival, to create and exchange valuable knowledge and insight into the development of tomorrow’s healthcare technologies.
?In the Danish city of Odense, a strong robotics cluster collaborates closely with the life science cluster to break down barriers and make it easier to roll out user-friendly technology in hospitals. The Mayor of the city of Odense in Denmark, Peter Rahb?k Juel, believes robotics and automation are essential tools in healthcare:?
?A lack of qualified labour is a massive challenge in almost every sector in Denmark and in the rest of the world. As a society, we want to take care of our population, especially the elderly, who have created the wealth we benefit from today. We need to find suitable technologies to take care of our ageing population.?
What does the future of healthcare look like
Last past week, Odense hosted the 8th edition of WHINN, a yearly international conference on life science and healthcare technology. Over 600 participants from the public and private sector gathered to create better health innovation and improve future healthcare. Participants learned, listened and discussed robotics in healthcare, future citizens at home, the green transition, artificial intelligence, and digital ethics.?
“Healthcare robots will undergo the same development as industrial robots did during the past decades,” said Thiusius R. Savarimuthu, robotics researcher and professor at the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark.?
“By joining forces, we can ensure that we achieve acceleration within this field in Denmark, and we should use our unique potential to lead the way. I want to encourage close collaboration across hospitals, patients, and developers; The most successful solutions are created when we involve end users from the beginning.”
There is strong trust in Denmark between the public healthcare sector and private start-ups, and there are many collaborations between private and public partners, universities, and research institutions. This mutual trust has allowed exponential growth in Danish HealthTech start-ups and produced excellent solutions.
?Unique access to test new inventions in hospitals
In 2021, a brand new?Centre for Clinical Robotics?(CCR) was established in Odense in Denmark by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Southern Denmark and Odense University Hospital (OUH). CCR facilitates collaboration between clinicians and robotics companies and helps to identify, evaluate and deliver robot projects to the hospital.
“From a global perspective, it's unique how we in Denmark are able to develop and test new robotic solutions in hospitals in close collaboration with hospital staff and patients,” said S?ren Udby, Programme Manager at the Centre for Clinical Robotics in Odense, this is impossible in most other countries.?
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S?ren Udby expects that robots and automation solutions can help relieve and free clinicians from having to carry out heavy physical lifting and monotonous, repetitive tasks, so that they can instead carry out more patient-centric quality tasks for the benefit of patients.?
“One example is the laboratory field, where finding qualified applicants for vacant positions is particularly challenging. Robots and cobots can step in and take over some of the routine tasks and automate workflows, thus freeing up staff so they can take care of the more demanding and complex tasks. Another example is from the pathology field, where until last year, thousands of glass slides were manually filed, sorted, requisitioned, and discarded daily. At OUH alone, this required four full-time positions. A new, automated filing robot has freed up these four bioanalysts and reduced the requisition time for one glass slide from 8 minutes to 8 seconds! The Department of Clinical Pathology developed the robot in collaboration with SDU and The Region of Southern Denmark,” said S?ren Udby.
ARTHUR automates the scanning of patients' hands
Several kinds of robots developed in Denmark are already used in the healthcare sector today. For example, the UVD robot from Blue Ocean Robotics can disinfect to eliminate viruses. A rehabilitation robot from Life Science Robotics is helping patients regain mobility after they have suffered strokes. Health drones will soon be transporting blood samples. Autonomous mobile robots automate many internal logistic tasks and deliveries from the central sterile supply departments.?
Artificial intelligence will play a significant role in diagnosing and using robots in the operating room. One of Denmark's most recent healthcare robotics inventions is the ARTHUR robot from ROPCA, which can fully automate the scanning of patients’ hands for rheumatoid arthritis - without a clinician present. ARTHUR sends the results and images to the doctor, who then verifies the robot's prognosis. The robot frees a specialist from many routine scans.
In a study with ARTHUR and 25 patients, 92% concluded that they would accept ARTHUR as a permanent part of their rheumatologist follow-up. In other words, robots like this could play a role in solving the problem of the shortage in skilled labour :
“ARTHUR has enormous potential. Suddenly, we have an expert available that can do ultrasound scans all the time without being dependent on staff or the level of expertise among the doctors,”?said Bill Frederiksen, Rheumatologist and Ultrasound Specialist at Svendborg Hospital.?
S?ren Udby, Programme Manager at the Centre for Clinical Robotics in Odense, points out that robots like ARTHUR help create more equality and quality in healthcare:
“You can set up robots almost anywhere, which means that a medical examination will no longer risk being a 'postcode lottery'. The robot will perform the scan in the same way with the same quality every time, whether it’s in Esbjerg or Copenhagen.”