Human Health and Equity in an Age of Robotics and Intelligent Machines

Abstract

Advances in robotic technologies and intelligent machines will transform the way clinicians care for members of our community within a variety of health care settings, including the home, and, perhaps of far greater importance, o ff er a means to create a much more accessible, adaptable, and equitable world for every member of society. Robotics have already entered the health care ecosystem, and their presence is rapidly expanding. Surgical robots have become a com-mon fi xture in many medical centers. Outside of North America, robotic systems have emerged to meet an acute and growing labor shortage within skilled nursing facilities in Japan and were recently used to limit social contact and mitigate the risk of COVID-19 in China and South Korea (Khan et al., 2020). Regardless of the setting or application, key challenges to fully integrat-ing the development of algorithms and methods that enable shared human-robot and the real world, as well as technology deployment that is both cost-ef-fective and culturally centered so that all communities may bene fi t. Exploiting the transformative potential of these technologies will require intensive collaboration among policy makers, regulators, entrepreneurs, re-searchers, care providers, and those who would to from or may be subject to due to the use of paper outlines areas in which robotics could make the larg-est and most immediate impact, discusses existing and emergent challenges to their implementation, and identi fi es areas in which implementers will need to pay speci fi c to equitable access all.