| Project Detail |
How robots improve hospital resilience during pandemics
Hospitals across Europe have been struggling to cope under the enormous pressure caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the biggest challenges has been increasing the capacity of intensive care units. In this context, the EU-funded ODIN project has identified 11 hospital care challenges that can be addressed by combining robotics, IoT and AI. For instance, autonomous and collaborative robots can reduce the workload on overstretched hospital staff. The robots can provide a range of assistance services – from clinical to logistic. The project’s overall goal is to pave the way for data-driven procedures and management in healthcare.
Hospitals must increase their efficiency and productivity and boost quality and safety, while containing and reducing costs. This cannot be an untaught linear reduction. For instance, the number of ICU beds per million of EU habitants was reduced of 75% in the past 30 years, also in response to the unneglectable need to invest on territory healthcare services in response to democratic challenges. This left EU Hospitals completely unprepared to the COVID-19 pandemics, proving that hospital budget cuts must be complemented with major organizational restructuring, making use of innovative technologies.
We have identified 11 hospital critical challenges, which ODIN will face combining robotics, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to empower workers, medical locations, logistics and interaction with the territory. ODIN will deploy technologies along three lines of intervention: empowering workers (AI, cybernetics and bionics), introducing autonomous and collaborative robots and enhancing medical locations with IoT. These areas of intervention will be piloted in six hospitals (in Spain, France, Italy, Poland, The Netherland, Germany), via seven use cases, spanning from clinical to logistic, including patient management, disaster preparedness and hospital resiliency.ODIN pilot will be a federation of multicentre longitudinal cohort studies, demonstrating the safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of ODIN technologies for the enhancement of hospital safety, productivity and quality. Use-case protocols will be approved by the local hospital ethical committees, in order to assure the highest quality of the study, while providing a pragmatic solution for the scaling-up of the ODIN technological solutions and business models in a variety of local ecosystems.
ODIN vision is that as Evidence Based Medicine revolutionized medicine with data-driven procedures, so data-driven management (enabled by Industry 4.0 tech) can revolutionise hospital management |
