Hon Hai Precision Industry Co’s (鴻海精密) surgical scrub robot, codeveloped with Taichung Veterans General Hospital (TVGH), is in the development phase and could be launched as early as spring next year, a senior hospital official said yesterday.
The scrub robot is the second phase of Hon Hai and the hospital’s three-phase robotics collaboration, following the “Nurabot” — an artificial intelligence (AI) nursing assistant — developed in the first phase, hospital honorary superintendent Chen Shih-an (陳適安) said on the sidelines of the Healthcare+ Expo.
The third phase would involve developing more advanced personal care robots that could provide clinical assistance and save nurses considerable time, Chen said.
Photo: CNA
The scrub robot, expected to be the first such robot to be used in operating rooms, would help nurses handle repetitive, heavy-loaded and high-precision tasks, such as hand scrubbing and retrieving surgical instruments, Hon Hai digital health chief Barry Chiang (姜志雄) said.
The greatest challenge in developing the scrub robot is ensuring the precision of its computer vision, as the system must be able to identify and handle hundreds of types of surgical instruments, which have different shapes and usages, Chiang said.
Hon Hai also plans to apply robotics and smart factory concepts to radiation therapy, as the work is considered highly dangerous for humans, he said.
The company also wants to promote the use of autonomous mobile robots and exoskeleton robots in medical settings to help reduce the burden on healthcare personnel, with broader deployment expected as early as 2027, Chiang said.
An exoskeleton robot is a wearable powered frame that enhances a person’s strength and mobility, reducing physical strain when lifting or supporting patients.
Hon Hai is developing multimodal medical model applications with TVGH and other hospitals to enhance the smart use of medical data, Chiang said.
It yesterday announced that its AI nursing assistant, Nurabot, which was jointly developed with the hospital and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, has been deployed after four months of multistage testing in clinical settings.
Hon Hai said the hospital’s on-premises hospital information system allows Nurabot to monitor workflow transitions, while Nvidia Corp’s Jetson AGX Orin computing modules provide the robot with decisionmaking capabilities.
Nvidia’s Omniverse digital twin system enables Nurabot to simulate in real-time, and Hon Hai’s large language model FoxBrain supports its smart vision and model updates, the company said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS