Hospital porters go robotic

Matsushita Electric Works has come up with a robot that ships patient records, x-rays, medicine and so forth around hospitals in its password-protected innards. The HOSPI contains a PHS (a Japanese short-range digital cellphone technology) unit and so can be tracked on its progress and pinged if you need a pickup; it also uses the PHS transmitter to have the hospital elevators take it to whatever floor it's headed to. Since elevators these days are fairly smart, sounds like the makings of a class struggle right there. The HOSPI moves at about a metre per second, and runs for seven hours on an eight-hour charge assuming it's moving half the time, which almost proves our contention that everything has more battery life than an iPod these days.

[Mark Eichin @ Dec 19th 2005 2:23AM]

Looks and reads very much like the HelpMate (by one of Joe Engleberger's post-unimation companies) except the helpmate transported drugs and supplies securely - much more useful than moving paper around. It also did the "call the elevator via RF serial link" trick, and had excellent people-avoidance tech... in the mid 90's!