7. Robotics Systems and Healthcare Logistics

Including waste management, warehousing, inventory management, equipment maintenance, sanitation, and transportation, healthcare logistics has focused on providing more innovative and value-added services in recent years. Therefore healthcare services should be examined and aligned with the objectives of the entire healthcare supply chain to meet the needs of both individuals and organizations. This will help to improve the supply chain performance so that reflects on the patient outcomes. Lack of efficient storage areas, increasing wages/salaries, and some activities that are conducted by healthcare employees manually are the priority areas that require solutions. According to studies in the field of health logistics, supply chain activities take more than the time spent on patient care. In addition, the logistics activities that have to be done manually by the health personnel leave a negative impression on the patients. Based on these, healthcare logistics should be improved in order to decrease the level of fatigue of healthcare personnel and create more time to interact with patients. Serving various tasks and purposes in many business sector, robots are preparing to become one of the most important technological innovations for healthcare industry. Nowadays, the robotics community is largely focused on developing the next generation of service and social robots. It is predicted that the use of robots in diagnostics, surgery, rehabilitation, patient care, disinfection and cleaning, medicine and food distribution, vital signs measurement, disease prevention, and disease management will increase performance in healthcare services. Among these, robots providing disinfection and logistics services are predicted to have the shortest-term impact.