Collaborative robot acting as scrub nurse for cataract surgery (CRASCS).

Abstract

Worldwide, healthcare systems are struggling to tackle a nursing shortage. As per the data released by the American Hospital Association, the healthcare workforce could face a loss of around 5 lakh nurses by the end of the year. Consequently, it could result in those deficiencies, which will be 1.1 million instead of 0.6 million. The current nursing scenario in India as per the Indian Nursing Council (INC), which is a board under the ministry and is responsible for legally confirming and maintaining universal standardized training for nursing, is that the 1.96 nurses out of every 1000 Indians that are there are much behind the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommended figure of 3 nurses per 1000. To mitigate the nurse shortage, a collaborative robotic system was designed that can assist with surgical procedures with a collaborative robot acting as a scrub nurse for cataract surgery (CRASCS) represented in Fig. 1. Accordingly, the model has been built to empower a customized 3d printed 5-Degree of freedom robotic arm by tracking the phase of surgery in real-time and automatically supplying the clinician with the ideal equipment that is needed for the particular phase of surgery. The system is supported with one more model which can identify where the surgical equipment is located within the arm range. The system is also supported with voice commands which help in picking up the right surgical equipment in the middle of any phase of the surgery. In this way, the system could be able to potentially handle the shortage of surgical nurses around the world and benefit humanity.