iRobot Partners With InTouch, Ava to Start Caring About Your Health

Ava, iRobot's new experimental telepresence platform, now has a purpose: healthcare

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iRobot Partners With InTouch, Ava to Start Caring About Your Health

Back in October of 2009 when iRobot first announced their new healthcare robotics unit, I posted my prediction about what kind of platform we might expect to see:

Here’s my guess: a small mobile platform that integrates the telepresence features of the ConnectR with some kind of simple artificial intelligence that could locate and recognize people, deliver reminders and information based on natural language voice queries, and summon help in an emergency. It would be connected to the internet and could integrate with, say, a doctor’s office or a pharmacy to provide prescription schedules and monitor drug interactions.

Turns out I wasn't far off with my telepresence concept. Just yesterday, iRobot announced a new partnership with InTouch Health (a remote presence telemedicine solution provider) to "explore potential opportunities for healthcare applications on iRobot platforms such as the iRobot Ava mobile robotics platform."

There aren't any details about what Ava will actually be doing (beyond nebulous statements like "we will revolutionize how people communicate and deliver information through remote presence"), but if anything, Ava is going to be capable of much more than I suggested in my original prediction, which was based on the relatively limited ConnectR platform. In retrospect, this is likely a big part of the reason why iRobot canceled ConnectR in the first place in favor of what would become Ava, but I digress.

It seems likely that Ava is going to start off in a hospital setting, cruising around and letting doctors interact with patients via telepresence. This isn't the first step towards robots replacing human doctors or anything, but if there's a specialist that you want to see who lives across the country, telepresence is far more effective than a phone call. As far as when we can expect Ava to start making house calls, well... Telepresence is one of the few robotics markets that consumers (or small businesses) could actually get involved in, so it's certainly possible that some of the telepresence technology embodied in Ava might eventually end up in some kind of Ava / ConnectR love-child. Now there's a mental picture for you.

[ iRobot ]

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