Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, in collaboration with Ookuma Electric Co., Ltd. and Applied Vision Systems Co., has developed a robot that can sort through medication ampules, and as a result can probably reduce medical mistakes and improve pharmacists’ working conditions:
Currently, pharmacists dispense medicine from ampoules based on doctors’ prescriptions. At big hospitals, the amount of medicine dispensed is quite large, so the burden on pharmacists is also quite large, resulting in up to 15% of malpractice cases stemming from the dispensation of incorrect medicines.
In order to prevent these kinds of accidents, it is necessary to automate the handling of medical ampoules. According to rules devised by the Japan Federation of Medical Devices Associations, ampoules must be labeled with UCC EAN 128 barcodes, and this allows machines to automatically recognize the kind of medicine contained in the ampoule. However, the task to approach ampoules to the bar code readers is not automated, and since humans are involved, the possibility of mistakes caused by human error cannot be avoided.
For these reasons, we felt it necessary to develop a system that could automatically recognize medical ampoules, use robots to handle them, dispense the medicine properly using the information contained in the barcodes, and store the medicine properly on the shelves…
Two-dimensional image processing is not sufficient to recognize objects that are piled up or in various positions, so it is necessary to use three-dimensional systems. However, medical ampoules have a glossy surface that makes even three-dimensional processing difficult due to the halation caused by reflections. This new system is based on an advanced 3D vision system and improves on the stereo correlation method so that with the help of a multiple camera system, even items with glossy surfaces can be detected.
The press release…