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Photos by Reed Hutchinson UCLA Photographic
Services
Neil Martin communicates with Tim Copeland,
thanks to RONI (right), the first robot to be used in an
ICU. |
A Virtual Bedside Manner
Meet RONI the robot
by CYnthia Lee
ucla today staff
The newest employee on the seventh story of the UCLA Medical Center
whirs softly across the floor of the intensive care unit as nurses
bustle around patients’ partitions decked with high-tech monitors
and the latest in electronic medical equipment.
Perhaps that’s why RONI, short for “Robot of the Neuro
ICU” and formally known as RP-6, appears at home in the neurosurgery
ICU. It rolls up to nurses and pleasantly asks about the events
of the morning, swiveling its large monitor-head to decipher data
displayed on a wall monitor.
Standing 5 feet, 6 inches tall — from its sturdy triangular-shaped
base to the top of its video camera — RONI is the alter ego
of Neil Martin, chief of neurosurgery, who is physically in his
NPI office but virtually on RONI’s monitor-head.
Everything RONI sees shows up on one of two monitors in front of
Martin. Using a joy stick, Martin steers around obstacles, which
are detected by the robot’s infrared sensors and appear as
markers on the doctor’s screen. Martin also gets a view of
what the nurses see. Occasionally, he glances at another monitor
to see information from hospital databases. In this way, he can
view X-rays, reports, lab results or vital signs.
The first institution to use a robot in an ICU, the UCLA Medical
Center is one of a dozen hospitals evaluating the communication
robot as a way of making critical-care specialists more available
to patients, their families and hospital staff. Studies have shown
that RONI can decrease morbidity, mortality and the length of a
patient’s hospital stay, not to mention the cost of care.
“This is no substitute for normal interaction with a patient,
which I continue to have as always,” said Martin. Along with
his colleague, Paul Vespa, Martin can monitor patients both from
his office and home. “The vast majority of my interactions
with patients and families are personal,” he said. “But
if one of my patients has a problem at 3 a.m. and I need to deal
with it in three minutes, I can be there immediately through the
robot.”
While patients feel awkward at first talking to a robot, “within
a minute, they start interacting as if you were standing right there,”
Martin said. “They’re looking at your face, and you’re
looking at theirs.”
Tim Copeland, 15, was in the ICU recovering from surgery when he
met RONI. “I was surprised, to say the least,” he recalled.
“But the screen was large enough, so I saw Dr. Martin’s
whole face, and the quality of the audio was so good that it sounded
like he was right there.” If RONI makes it more convenient
for Dr. Martin to see patients like him more often, Copeland added,
“then I think it’s a good idea.”
Robots like RONI may be the best way to help critical-care specialists
treat older, sicker patients as the ranks of seniors swell. What’s
more, robots may one day enable specialists in urban hospitals to
become virtually available in rural hospitals or remote Army field
hospitals, Martin said.
One age bracket in particular is likely to welcome the change.
“When I visited a 14-year-old boy in the pediatric unit, the
nurse asked me if the robot could visit the other kids,” Martin
said. “They all wanted to talk to the robot.”
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