Disney's late-2014 movie is arguably Hollywood's box office dark horse, and from a tech nerd's point of view, it taps into two hot spots in the U.S. tech world: robotics and health care. These two markets are also big in Chinese tech, with one predicted to reach $10 trillion by 2020 and the other $8 trillion. The Great White is not only perfect, it's close to being realized.
First, a brief dissection of the Great White - the balloon shell is a bit child-oriented, but the carbon fiber skeleton, cute exterior design, with voice recognition and human sign scanning capabilities, these are all very reasonable and mainstream design. Great White is a conglomerate of three major tech industries: mobile healthcare, robotics manufacturing and artificial intelligence.
First, mHealth
It's now more commonly known as mHealth. mHealth was defined in the US at the 2010 mHealth Summit as the delivery of healthcare services via mobile devices. When you think about it this way, Dabai, the mobile robot, does fit that definition.
The full name of mHealth in English was originally "Emerging mobile communication and network technologies for health care," which translates to "[a]n emerging mobile communication and network technologies for health care. Emerging mobile communication and network technologies for health care". So the rise of mobile health care, at the beginning of the fundamental reason is the development and popularization of communication and network technology, cost reduction, the popularity of equipment, especially the large number of smart phones deployed, there is an outbreak of mobile health care. At present, mHealth is still in the middle of the development of communication technology dividend.
Logically, the popularization of mobile devices has led to the mHealth industry. Then the maturity of the robotics industry is an indicator of when the Great White will be built. The Great White is indeed not far away. A doctor and nurse who are around 24/7 is extremely costly, but replaced by a robotic health assistant, the cost will indeed drop to incredibly low.
Both the US and Japan are doing it, and each has its own specialty of building medical robots.
U.S. and Japanese Medical Robotics Examples
U.S.
IntouchHealth - the venerable mHealth company - interconnects 10,000 U.S. communities and clinics. Their strategic investor iRobot, a top US robotics company, has single-handedly created a line of robots for IntouchHealth, which they call - telemedicine robots.
These robots can function as doctor stand-ins in community hospitals, patients' homes, hospital rooms and more. A doctor controlling the robot remotely would be able to follow a patient's life over time, monitor his or her habits and provide a more thorough course of treatment.
Also, DigitalHealth, a top-five healthcare organization in the nation, is building its own telemedicine robot.
The U.S. Army - The U.S. Army's Center for Research in Telemedicine and Advanced Technology commissioned Massachusetts-based robotics company VECNA to develop an automated field ambulance technology, which ultimately evolved into the Battlefield Assisted Evacuation Robot (BEAR), to perform the full suite of field ambulance functions such as rescuing and transferring casualties
Japan
Japan
Twendy-One - a robot invented at Japan's Waseda University - differs from IntouchHealth's telemedicine orientation in that twendy-one's overriding goal is to mimic a human caregiver. The robot, whose hands strongly mimic those of humans and can already pick up habits and squeeze ketchup in initial demonstrations, is expected to go into service in 2015 to care for the elderly and sick. The drawback is the expensive pricing - in the neighborhood of 30 million yen.
Toyota -- In 2011, it released four robots for medical care to help people with limited mobility due to paralysis of the lower limbs, including the "Independent Walking Assistant," "Walking Exercise Assistant," and "Walking Assistant. These include the "Independent Walking Assistant," "Walking Exercise Assistant," "Balance Exercise Assistant," and "Helping Mobility Assistant. Yoichi Inoue, Toyota's director of specialization, said, "Assistant robots for nursing and medical care will become increasingly important as the number of children and the aging population increase."
YASKAWA - In 2014, they released a rehabilitation robot to assist patients with physical rehabilitation. Their product, however, is more of an automated adaptation of the original rehabilitation equipment, which is more ergonomic and improves the efficiency of medical care.
HAL -- HAL (HybridAssistiveLimb), a product of CYBERDYNE, a company of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, is the world's first device to pass ISO13482 certification as a wearable assistive system, and its medically improved version has even passed as a medical device through the It is the first device in the world to receive ISO 13482 certification as a wearable assistive system. Designed to help people with lower limb muscle atrophy, it's designed to help you stand up, walk, stop, lift your leg and go up and down the stairs when you want to, and it's just the thing to do it.
You could call HAL a wearable robot, a nod to Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey from the acronym, which featured a robot called HAL.
Creating AI
How strong does a medical robot's artificial intelligence need to be? It may be that sci-fi movies have imagined AI too much, from the genocidal Tenno to the near-perfect human Jude Law in Artificial Intelligence. But AI is already in everyone's life, with carefully designed "software" designed to help you become more efficient. Maybe the AI in today's medical robots can't replace doctors, but there are certainly ways to make you healthier.
Da Bai's biggest task is to scan a target user through a camera and other devices, sensing his or her signs, health data, and mood, and then taking steps to provide health care. In the animation, the main character, Hong, is hugged by Great White twice, once because his brother died and his low mood was scanned by Great White; and once when he fell into the water and was hugged by Great White after he sensed a drop in body temperature. Great White also adjusted his own temperature to raise Ah Hong's body temperature. Think about this is not very similar to NEST? In fact, NEST is to the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine talent by Google to see and acquire.
Here are a couple of products from companies that can make Great White.
JIBO - represented as a home app - is not as smart compared to DeepMind and IBM's Watson, but they have an important feature - voice interaction and emotion recognition.JIBO's system utilizes NLP ( Neuro-Linguistic Programming) to understand commands and even everyday conversations. It is able to recognize users and their family members, and perform different voice interactions by the differences in the users, as well as recognizing the differences in their emotions.
Nest - derived from the American habit of using thermostats - is able to learn the user's sensitivity to temperature, and through the IoT, changes in the ambient temperature and other changes in the surrounding environment, to regulate all the devices connected to the NEST, so as to achieve the user's preferred room temperature, humidity, and so on.
DeepMind - that's the name of the AI company Google acquired after it bought NEST - was merged into Google's oldest search group and given the task of making knowledge. Isn't that lofty? That's because DeepMind's deep learning algorithms have given their AI the ability to learn, and at CES they showed how DeepMind can "play" a brand new game. The future looks good for a doctor who teaches his robot a few times, and then his robot knows how to treat him, doesn't it?
Robot vision
Besides AI for automation, Big White's ability to scan the human body is essential, and there is a reference for this kind of black tech in reality - Microsoft, who recently came up with a godsend in the form of the Hololens. Their KinectOne (computer version named KinectV2, here abbreviated as Kinect2) perennial hanging depth camera field of rivals, is the best visual equipment for the big white.
Kinect2 - Microsoft opted for TOF instead of structured light (Kinect1's technology). It is now possible to recognize muscle stretch, body temperature and heart rate - all data needed in health care. The principle of implementation, using temperature and inflammation as a simple example, is to identify the temperature of the human body by intercepting the color of its body surface, and the accuracy is still evolving.
There are also teams in China that are utilizing ordinary cameras and OpenCV-related technologies to accomplish similar tasks - PointConnect Technology, which claims to be able to utilize camera blood pressure measurement technology, though it has not been verified.
How we do it
As a team starting up in the field of home service robots and telemedicine robots, we are currently making two kinds of care robots, large and small, based on the open-source ROS (Robotics System), which are mainly for children and the elderly. The core function is similar to IntouchHealth, which is remote control.
In addition, in order to make the robot acceptable to the target user group, we put bionic pressure sensors and a natural language synthesis chip into the robot so that the robot is able to feel at least 10 levels of touch and give interaction. Combined with a natural language processing system, the robot can synthesize the user's familiar voice to replace the robot's voice to do the function of reading text messages and voice interaction. For example, an elderly person with poor eyesight can synthesize the voices of his children to read text messages for the elderly, remind her to take her medication, and so on.