Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to summarise findings of a review of service user and carer involvement in safeguarding and recommendations for good practice. Design/methodology/approach – The study involved a review of selected literature and a consultation exercise with experts in...

Demonstrates that present technologies are sufficient to produce a household robot for the elderly or disabled, that is able to undertake a wide range of domestic chores and supply 24 hour care and companionship.

The development and current specification for the Shadow Hand and Arm project are described. The Shadow robot has human like movements and uses air muscles to replicate the action of human muscles. This produces a robot mechanism that is compliant, intrinsically safe and suitable for use in...

Ultrasound examinations represent one of the major diagnostic modalities of future healthcare. They are currently used to support medical space research but require a high skilled operator for both probe positioning on the patient's skin and image interpretation. TERESA is a tele‐echography...

Purpose – This paper aims to review of the use of robots in two healthcare applications: surgery and prosthetics. Design/methodology/approach – Following a brief introduction, this paper first considers robotic surgery and discusses a selection of commercial products, applications and recent...

Purpose – This paper seeks to build awareness of how telepresence or service robots are coming to the aid of students who might not otherwise be able to attend school in person or others who might need to be in two places at once. Design/methodology/approach – Discussions with the...

Describes the history of Integrated Surgical Systems (ISS), the US company that created ROBODOC, a surgical robot system used to perform total human hip replacement surgery, and ORTHODOC, a computer workstation that enables orthopaedic surgeons to examine a patient’s bone more accurately and...