June 14, 2005

iRobot

engadget, one of the blogs I read when I should be finishing that article about therapeutic misconception my lunch, reports on a new kind of threat from computers in healthcare settings: robots that attack patients.
nobody is quite sure what prompted poor, mild-mannered Waldo (who gives robots named like Waldo?) — a lowly medicine-delivering bot — to run amok and terrorize the cancer ward. Waldo apparently blazed past the pharmacy and blew into the radiation oncology examining room where a physician was treating a cancer patient — and wouldn’t leave (wouldn’t leave? Don’t these things have an off switch?). It was enough to prompt the patient to flee the room in terror. What could disturb a robot so deeply? Messy breakup with Emma the nursebot?

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