Doctors as Robots
Dr. Alan Shatzel’s pager beeped at 9 on a Saturday morning. A man had suffered a stroke, and someone had to decide, quickly, whether to give him an anticlotting drug that could mean the difference between life and death….Dr. Shatzel, a neurologist, hustled not to the emergency room where the patient lay — 260 miles away, in Bakersfield — but to a darkened room at a hospital here. He took a seat in front of the latest tools of his trade: computer monitors, a keyboard and a joystick that control his assistant on the scene — a robot on wheels….In speaking directly with the patient, examining his face and control of his hands and glancing with the camera at the cardiac monitor in the room, Dr. Shatzel could assess the stroke, he said, with the same acuity as if he were there. He instructed the staff to administer the drug.
Full article on doctors utilizing robots on wheels to diagnose patients.
Don’t knock it. There may be a lot of advantages to being cared for by robots.
Could be an improvement over human doctors, so long as the long distance robot controller is first rate.
It’s hard to imagine any TLC coming from a robot.
Perhaps the robot will display one of these 🙂 to let you know that you will get better.
Interesting concept. Maybe this is where we are headed.