AI is transforming medical robotics, but not in the ways many people expect.
In this episode, KUKA Robotics USA’s Silke Wendt, Global Marketing Medical Robotics, and Corey Ryan, Director of Medical Robotics, discuss how labor shortages, increasing quality demands, and growing interest in AI are shaping the future of medical robotics. While AI is becoming more prevalent in areas such as simulation, collision detection, and path planning, they emphasize that regulatory requirements limit its role in autonomous clinical decision-making. They also highlight KUKA's focus on quality, strategic partnerships, global expansion, and the development of new robotic platforms to support a growing range of medical applications.
Tune in to hear how KUKA is navigating the opportunities and challenges of AI, automation, and innovation in healthcare robotics!
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[00:00:02] Hi, my name is Silke Wendt and I work for KUKA and Global Medical Marketing. Yeah. Corey Ryan, I work for KUKA Robotics USA. I'm responsible for the medical team here, both sales and support and growth with our medical customers. Okay, biggest shift in the medtech I see at the moment is of course that a lot of AI is coming in. We have also a very high demand or labor shortage and then demand of getting more quality into the operation room.
[00:00:32] And that influences everything. Yeah. What's working best for our company at the moment or right now is that we are looking into different fields again. So finding new partners, collaborating with different companies and try to make new partnerships. Also diving into different markets, not just the US market, but also Asian markets. And to see if you need to fulfill our strategy there and try to get new relationships. Okay, so the biggest challenges that we're seeing is really there's two pieces.
[00:00:59] We're seeing a lot of expectation of AI being integrated in, but without an understanding of what it's capable of doing. So medical is very restrictive in the activities that are allowed to be automated. And you can't just have AI randomly changing the procedure or adapting a process without some kind of personal approval. You need some kind of clinical person there that's deciding that the AI change is acceptable.
[00:01:26] And everyone that we're seeing is kind of coming up and expecting AI to be this deeply rooted, well integrated system. And it's not. We're seeing AI for doing things like collision detection, path planning, but we're not seeing AI really jumping into the medical treatment part of things. The other thing we're seeing is a real big growth in competitive low cost robots.
[00:01:50] The problem again, there is we're seeing a lot of robots coming out of China and some of these low cost countries and the price is very low, but the quality is also very low. And so when you're selling a very premium product, which is what we are, we're probably number one in the medical space. But the product is well known for the amount of features that we have, the special configuration, the quality of the product. It's really hard to explain to customers how somebody can build a competitive product that is so cheap.
[00:02:17] And the answer is, it is a cheaply built product for the most part. You know, we're seeing some changes, the quality is getting a little better, but the number of new companies developing these low cost cobots is enormous. And China has a huge market and a very low target for pricing. So it's not something that can extrapolate into the outside of China. But we see people that look at that market and go, why can't I get that? That's a real challenge for us.
[00:02:44] So the kind of procedures that we've gotten involved in, in the US specifically, and many of them are global. We do hair transplants, rehabilitation, minimally invasive surgery, bone cutting, alignment for spinal screws. The really kind of unique thing that is part of our go to market is we're very customer and application agnostic. We provide the robot arm and software features that offer the motion control under very safe conditions.
[00:03:13] We will sell to absolutely direct competitors because the magic of the medical treatment is not in the robot. It's in the customer and that would be the clinician's experience and the patient outcome. It's not the robot. We're providing the motion control so they don't have to worry about something they don't do. But they're providing that experience and that's why people buy their system. That's how they differentiate from company A to company B.
[00:03:38] And you'll never see KUKA's name on anything, but we're integrated into thousands of systems out there. For next year, we're actually very excited. We've got a new non-medical cobot that we're releasing and software is actually being upgraded right now to become very user friendly. Does simulation, has a little bit of AI in it. The really important thing is that you don't need a medical grade cobot to go to market in the med space.
[00:04:02] We've got customers using very large industrial robots carrying seven or eight hundred pounds within three feet of a patient right now. And we've been doing it for 20 years so we can get robots through the FDA. This kind of gives us a little bit more competition to those low cost cobot that you're seeing out in the market. I think the beauty for Kuku right now is the kinematic that we use is very solid. If you look at a lot of cobot's, they're hollow tube robots with gears and motors on the end.
[00:04:32] Eventually, they kind of rattle themselves loose and they start to fall apart. Most cobot's a couple of years of use and they're kind of done. Our cobot is based on our industrial platform. So it's a solid steel core, very rigid, very strong, high performance. So once we kind of get the software right, it's really going to be a big boom for our business. We are also looking into another cobot that we are planning to launch at the market that is still a development. And this is going to be very useful.
[00:05:01] If you want to find out more, come to booths 607 at the device talks. We've got a full staff there. KUKA.com. It's K-U-K-A dot com. Or you can email me directly. Corey.Ryan.Kuka.com. C-O-R-E-Y period R-Y-A-N at K-U-K-A dot com.