Last Tuesday, we had the pleasure of visiting the Skåne University Hospital as well as the departments of Computer Science and Automatic Control at the Lund Tekniska Högskola.
The day started with the shadowing of head of surgery Phan-Kiet Tran, who has a big vision for the use of robotics in the healthcare sector. A particularly interesting use-case is being researched in an ongoing VINNOVA project called CAISA (Collaborative AI Operations Assistant), where a robot can help with tool hand-overs or lend a steady hand to help out the surgeon (you can read more about it here (in Swedish)). To this end, we watched along with an open-heart surgery. There are definitely many interesting problems to solve here, ranging from human-robot interaction to vision and detection algorithm. It was great to see the excitement from the hospital staff and their willingness to try out new things. A theater operating room is furthermore available where practice surgeries can be performed to validate new methods.
Another use-case at the hospital, very much in line with our application area of lab automation, is to have mobile robots take samples to a small lab down the hallways and return results during operations. Tests might te be ran every 15 minutes, and therefore this can be a big time cost for the nurses assisting the surgeries, who already have too high of a workload.
In the afternoon, we visited the Computer Science department and the Automatic Control department at the Lund Tekniska Högskola. We got a tour of the lab and the various robotics setup, discussed about research areas that are being pursued and which support would be appreciated from the WARA.
We would like to thank Maj Stenmark for hosting us for this insightful day, and we are excited about the research and visions that were presented to us!
