This article offers a brief overview of most current and potential uses and applications of robotics in health/care and social care, whether commercially ready and available on the market or still at the various stages of research and prototyping. We provide carefully hand-picked examples and pointers to ongoing research for each set of identified robotics applications and then discuss the main ingredients for the success of these applications, as well as the main issues surrounding their adoption for everyday use, including sustainability in non-technical environments, patient/user safety and acceptance, ethical considerations such as patient/user privacy, and cost effectiveness. We examine how robotics could (partially) fill in some of the identified gaps in current telehealthcare and home care/self-care provisions. The article concludes with a brief glimpse at a couple of emerging developments and promising applications in the field (soft robots and robots for disaster response) that are expected to play important roles in the future.

A quantitative angle-independent 2-D modality for flow and tissue imaging based on multi-angle plane wave acquisition was evaluated. Simulations of realistic flow in a carotid artery bifurcation were used to assess the accuracy of the vector Doppler (VD) technique. Reduction in root mean square deviation from 27 cm/s to 6 cm/s and 7 cm/s to 2 cm/s was found for the lateral (vx) and axial (vz) velocity components, respectively, when the ensemble size was increased from 8 to 50. Simulations of a Couette flow phantom (vmax = 2.7 cm/s) gave promising results for imaging of slowly moving tissue, with root mean square deviation of 4.4 mm/s and 1.6 mm/s for the x- and z-components, respectively. A packet acquisition scheme providing both B-mode and vector Doppler RF data was implemented on a research scanner, and beamforming and further post-processing was done offline. In vivo results of healthy volunteers were in accordance with simulations and gave promising results for flow and tissue vector velocity imaging. The technique was also tested in patients with carotid artery disease. Using the high ensemble vector Doppler technique, blood flow through stenoses and secondary flow patterns were better visualized than in ordinary color Doppler. Additionally, the full velocity spectrum could be obtained retrospectively for arbitrary points in the image.

No abstract

No abstract