displays/exhibits, history of medicine, history of technology, medical technology, news
Are we on the edge of a robot revolution in medicine?
After the large-scale renovation of its permanent collection in 2005, the Hunterian Museum in London has expanded its outreach programme under the leadership of senior curator Simon Chaplin. Today, the museum opens another new temporary show, “Sci-Fi Surgery: Medical Robots“.
Running until 23 December, the exhibition displays the world of medical robotics. Things like the Probot (1991), a robot designed to aid prostate gland surgery; Freehand, a robotic camera holder for keyhole surgery; mini-robots designed to make their own way around the inside of the human body; the prototype Robotic Camera Pill (2005); and the ARES Robot prototype (2009) which requires patients to swallow up to 15 different modules which then re-assemble inside the body into a larger device that can carry out surgical procedures.
The exhibition will also feature medical robots from sci-fi: from the 1920s ‘Pyschophonic Nurse’ to Japanese Manga and Anime, raising the question to what extent scientists are inspired by the representation of medical robots in films, books and comics.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that the exhibition has been funded by, among others, The Japan Foundation and The Japan Society.
Sci-Fi Surgery: Medical Robots events including anime and film screenings, discussions and robot family workshops.
Sounds like a great show — I cannot attend the opening — but it looks a must for the annual London trip.
07 Sep 2009 Thomas
Thanks Thomas. We had the opening last night, with live demonstrations of several of the robotic technologies shown in the exhibition. Among them was the RP-7, made by InTouch Health (http://bit.ly/t9Vod) and used at St Mary’s Hospital in London. Described as a ‘a mobile robotic platform that enables the physician to be remotely present’, it is designed to give clinicians remote access to their patients – for our event, the robot was controlled by David Stuart in California, who was able to steer it round the museum and engage in conversations with visitors. It was impressive, but also disconcerting. I guess that if you’re used to Skype or other video call systems the idea of holding conversations through a monitor is easier – from the evidence of our visitors, this wasn’t the case, though most seemed to take to the concept pretty quickly. I was a little sceptical about the idea of replacing face-to-face contact between clinician and patient with a robotic interface, but James Ballantyne, the PhD student from Imperial College who brought the RP-7 along, made the comment that for training rounds, it may be less discomforting for the patient to communicate through a robot than to have a dozen or more medcal students standing round his or her bed. And the principle of a transatlantic (or even more distant) consultation was certainly proved viable. But it still made me wonder about the way in which the physical form of such technologies, and their real or perceived anthropomorphic attributes, affect our responses – see http://anthropomorphism.org/pdf/Imitating.pdf for a discussion which touches on another ‘nursebot’.
Thanks for this report, Simon. Your description of the robotic interface reminds me of a talk that Jan Eric Olsén here at Medical Museion gave 6-7 years ago at one of the Nordic history of medicine conferences. He showed a wonderful 1880s-something drawing of a horse and a group of physiologists separated by a wall but connected with a radio-ish receiver/transmitter system. The physiologists were enthusiastic about being able to hear the horse’s heartbeat mediated by means of the technology — today we laugh at it, but it was dead serious in the 1880s.