Stanford's new 'smart hospital' has robots, automated guided vehicles
As hospitals around the world continue to incorporate smart technologies and robots, Stanford University is building a tech-powered health care center from ground up. The fully-connected place, opened at the Stanford Health Care's campus, employs robots, automated vehicles, and several other technologies to automate day-to-day hospital activities and leave human capabilities mostly for patient care. Here's all about it.
Connected tech for patient support, care
The new smart hospital offers patients an option to control the entertainment lighting and climate of their room with a pad next to their bed. Then, they also get access to an app, called MyHealth, which provides a one-touch option to get in touch with the doctors or to find the way through the halls of the hospitals.
Then, there's support of robots, automated vehicles
In addition to patient-focused features, Stanford's hospital also uses the power of robots, which pick and pack pills and take them to the dispensing stations. Plus, there also two dozen automated guided vehicles that roam around on their own and help with tasks like taking out the trash and delivering laundry on time. This saves the time of hospital staff for more skilful tasks.
Capabilities to keep an eye on patients
Among other things, the hospital also offers camera support for easy monitoring of patients (by both doctors and nurses) from a single location. Plus, if the need comes, they can even send alerts to locked-down mobile devices of the patients. The equipment used in the hospital is also tracked with sensors so that the inventory never goes empty.
More updates are also set to come
The team behind the hospital says that this is just the early phase of the new hospital and it will get more upgrades. For instance, we might see the infrastructure of the center move to 5G wireless in the near future. They could also start using an AI system using depth and thermal sensors for patients' safety.
Improvement in productivity
As the tech-packed facility has just opened, it remains to be seen how effective it proves in the real world, both from the point of cost and care. On its part, Stanford hopes that the facility's automation would certainly offload employees and boost productivity.
