Humanoid robot performs medical procedures using remote control
UCSD tests Unitree G1 humanoid robot in real medical procedures
UCSD equipped a Unitree G1 humanoid robot with Inspire Gen4 robotic hands and developed a bimanual teleoperation system for it as well. Both allow it to perform seven varied medical procedures using a remote control operated by a human using foot pedals, HTC Vive trackers, and motion-capture cameras.
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3 Unlike traditional surgical robots that are expensive and highly specialized, humanoid robots offer more flexibility.
UCSD ARCLAB
These tasks the robot carried out ranged from physical exams like auscultation and palpation, to emergency procedures such as Bag Valve Mask ventilation and endotracheal intubation. Some of them even required a great deal of precision, like ultrasound-guided injections.
There were some challenges with force control and sensor sensitivity, but the robot managed to carry out most tasks given to it with accuracy.
Medical robot trial results show strong potential for hospital use
For examinations, it successfully used a stethoscope and performed basic physical examinations. In these tests, performance was hindered by limitations in sensor feedback and hand design. For emergency care, it achieved consistent ventilation. However, it required human assistance to maintain the necessary seal and force required for intubation.
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3 There were some challenges with force control and sensor sensitivity, but the robot managed to carry out most tasks given to it with accuracy.
UCSD ARCLAB
When it came to needle procedures, it performed ultrasound-guided injections. It achieved a 70% success rate when performed by non-clinicians, demonstrating its potential for training purposes. Trials showed issues with needle control and orientation during suturing, indicating that the haptic feedback mechanisms need improvement.
How humanoid robots could transform healthcare and hospital staffing
This is the first major study to add humanoid robots to hospital work systems. With aging populations and ongoing labor shortages, these adaptable robots could support routine and emergency tasks in hospital settings. This robot could take immense pressure off medical staff. The versatility and ability to be remotely controlled make it particularly appealing for settings that require rapid response and tools that can carry out a wide range of tasks.
What this means for you
3 With aging populations and ongoing labor shortages, these adaptable robots could support routine and emergency tasks in hospital settings.
UCSD ARCLAB
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If you've ever waited too long in an ER, struggled to book a specialist appointment, or worried about overworked healthcare providers, this research should catch your attention. Humanoid robots like the Unitree G1 aren't replacing doctors, but they could support them in real, practical ways. From performing emergency procedures in remote areas to helping with routine physical exams in crowded hospitals, these robots could ease bottlenecks and improve care access.
For patients, that could mean shorter wait times, faster treatment, and safer hospital environments where medical teams are less stretched. For families in rural or underserved areas, this technology could offer critical care support where medical staff is limited. And for healthcare workers, it could bring much-needed relief by taking on repetitive or physically taxing tasks.
While the tech is still evolving, these early results suggest a future where hospitals have robotic teammates, not just tools, helping deliver faster, smarter care.
Kurt's key takeaways
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While humanoid robots like the Unitree G1 are not ready to fully replace humans, they're steadily proving how capable they are in medical environments. The researchers just need to solve issues like force control, sensitivity, and dexterity. Once they do, we will see these robots in operating rooms around the world assisting with surgeries. They will make our struggling healthcare systems far more resilient and accessible.
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Newsweek
8 hours ago
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While disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) like abatacept canreduce arthritis activity and slow progression of symptoms, most people still experience flare-ups. And for those with 'pre-RA', who may have detectable levels of RA antibodies but no symptoms, there aren't any approved treatments to prevent disease onset. Older woman holding hand in pain. Older woman holding hand in new treatment approach builds on previous research led by Dr. Nunzio Bottini, director of the Kao Autoimmunity Institute at Cedars-Sinai, and Nisarg Shah, chemical and nano engineering professor at University of California San Diego. They reported that calcitriol-loaded nanoparticles (CLNP)—calcitriol being the active form of vitamin D3—help regulate immune responses and decrease inflammation for autoimmune diseases in joints. The nanoparticles were made of a polymer containing calcitriol, while the researchers also attached a small protein fragment to them. The fragment is derived from something called aggrecan (Agg), a protein in the joints that the immune system can mistakenly attack in RA. To expand on their previous work, the researchers set out to assess whether the modified nanoparticles could treat RA flares and pre-RA. They first improved the nanoparticle formulation, focusing on size and stability, to ensure they were free from contaminants and could be safely frozen for a month. They then confirmed the nanoparticles regulate dendritic cell activity, a type of immune cell responsible for initiating inflammation and flare-ups in RA. "It is not well known what might prompt the onset of RA mainly because it is hard to get tissue from patients who do not have clear arthritis yet and we cannot predict the onset of flares to take blood or tissue right before they happen," Bottini told Newsweek. "However, for disease onset it is believed the autoimmune attack grows over a long period of time without clinical symptoms, before emerging as clinical RA. And continuous T cell education by dendritic cells plays a role in the process. "For flares it is believed that 'resident T cells' remain in the joints once the disease has been controlled and they can cause re-emergence of inflammation based on poorly understood fluctuations. But dendritic cells once again likely play a key role in generating/stimulating those T cells." Doctor examining older patient's hand. Doctor examining older patient's hand. Chinnapong/Getty Images The researchers took blood samples from people with and without RA and treated the samples with the newly formed Agg-CLNP (the nanoparticles with the protein). Agg-CLNP reduced dendritic cell activity which, in turn, reduced the cell's immune response, according to the researchers. By suppressing the immune response, Agg-CLNP could help alleviate RA symptoms like inflammation and swelling. The team also tested Agg-CLNP in a mouse model for RA. It was found to delay inflammation and swelling when given as a preventative treatment, but had little effect when administered after the onset of RA. In a follow-up, the researchers gave both the (currently used) arthritis drug abatacept and Agg-CLNP to the mice. They found that this combination delayed disease onset and reduced joint inflammation, swelling and bone damage. Additional tests in mice also showed Agg-CLNP reduced future RA flare severity when administered after corticosteroid treatment, which is often used to provide symptomatic relief in conditions like RA, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), asthma and more. "There is currently no approved treatment to prevent flares so this would be the first. For disease prevention, some trials of immunosuppressive agents administered to patients at risk (as assessed by early symptoms or strong family history) have shown promising results but implementation will depend on risk-benefit considerations," said Bottini. "We show that our nanoparticle combined with one of these agents enhances its preventative effectiveness, which might help eventually take the combination into the clinic." These results highlight Agg-CLNP as a potential therapeutic to address current limitations in RA treatments, the researchers said. "We think it will mainly help with preventing disease onset in patients at risk probably in combination with other immunosuppressants and to prolong the time to next flare in patients with good control of RA," Bottini explained. "We don't know if one injection could be enough to prevent disease activity but if repeated injections [in the muscle] are needed we predict, they would occur at several months distance from each other. We are exploring whether this approach can be utilized in combination to reduce severity in patients who have active disease and not sufficient control with current therapies." The promising therapy will need to go through optimization and toxicity studies, which can only be done in an industry setting after licensing of the technology. "Currently, aggrecan is the antigen included in the particle. But our aspiration is that the nanoparticle is tailored based on information about the proteins that are attacked by the immune system in each individual patient as they can vary among patients," Bottini added. "The final result would be an injectable therapy that could be personalized to each patient to maximize efficacy." Do you have a tip on a health story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about arthritis? Let us know via health@ References Johnson, W. T., McBride, D., Kerr, M., Nguyen, A., Zoccheddu, M., Bollmann, M., Wei, X., Jones, R. M., Wang, W., Svensson, M. N. D., Bottini, N., & Shah, N. J. (2024). Immunomodulatory Nanoparticles for Modulating Arthritis Flares. ACS Nano, 18(3), 1892–1906. Johnson, W. T., Wilkinson, E. L., Iyer, N., Dolmat, M., Bollmann, M., Dada, N., Wei, X., Yang, S., Zhang, T., Yoo, G., Bernardo, M., Price, M., Frame, E., Ishimori, M., Giles, J. T., Wang, W., Svensson, M. N. D., Bottini, N., & Shah, N. J. (2025). Immunomodulatory nanoparticles enable combination therapies to enhance disease prevention and flare control in rheumatoid arthritis. ACS Central Science.
Medscape
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Cognitive Impact From Dementia Risk Factors Greater in Women
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'Clinicians should familiarize themselves with the 14 identified modifiable risk factors, and if their patients have these risk factors, consider their sex and age, and try to target the behavior changes accordingly to minimize the impact on cognition and dementia risk,' Fitzhugh said. The findings were presented on July 28 at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC) 2025. At Greater Risk It's well-known that women are at greater risk for dementia. The lifetime risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD) is 1 in 5 for women compared with 1 in 10 for men. Sex-specific factors such as pregnancy and menopause may contribute to this imbalance. But while many researchers tackle this issue from a biological perspective, Fitzhugh focuses on the effects of modifiable risk factors. 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Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Hotter summers could be making us sicker in unexpected ways
As the earth experiences hotter and hotter summers, new research using data from California emergency departments shows that the heat may be making us sicker than we know, and in ways we may not anticipate. A study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances tracked emergency department visits and fatalities in the state over the course of 11 years and found that while deaths increased both in cold and hot temperatures, especially among older adults, emergency room visits steadily increased as temperatures did - particularly among young children. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. The findings underscore the impact that a hotter planet has on lives, health and medical infrastructure. While scientists have spent decades covering how extreme heat and cold lead to death, 'we have a relatively poor understanding of whether those relationships are the same for morbidity - rates of disease and poor health,' said Carlos Gould, the paper's lead author and an environmental health scientist at the University of California San Diego. The focus on fatalities could be because of how deadly heat is - it's the most lethal form of extreme weather. High temperatures have been linked to cardiovascular deaths, chronic kidney disease mortality and respiratory failure. Heat can put undue stress on organs: The heart pumps faster to get blood flow to the skin; kidneys work harder to preserve the body's water. Those with preexisting conditions are more at risk in hot weather. The cold kills more people than heat does. As Earth warms, some projections indicate that temperature-related fatalities could decrease, but the effects would be unequal: Hotter and poorer countries would see an increase in deaths, while colder, wealthier countries would see a decrease. Some researchers contend it's a fraught comparison to begin with. 'It remains problematic to trade off mortality and morbidity from hot versus cold temperature extremes,' said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health and Global Environment at the University of Washington. 'People are not fungible. The goal of public health is to prevent as much morbidity and mortality as possible.' Gould said deaths are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to temperature's effects on society. Between 2006 and 2017, more people in California visited emergency rooms as temperatures went up, further burdening public health systems as the world got hotter. 'It is helpful to have more detailed analyses of temperature-morbidity relationships, to help identify interventions that could decrease hospitalizations during heat waves,' said Ebi. Gould added that while he was reluctant to generalize beyond the data from California, its rates of mortality to extreme temperatures were in line with those from across the country. The study found that as temperatures increased, more people visited emergency rooms for illnesses including those linked to poison, respiratory symptoms and nervous system problems. Data also showed that children under 5 visited emergency rooms at a higher rate than any other age group. 'Hot days can worsen our health far before they lead to deaths,' said Gould. 'And it can be a large range of things that we get sick from.' In some cases, it's difficult to know how these illnesses are linked to heat, said Robert Meade a research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who studies heat's impacts on the human body. It could be an error in how the data was analyzed, or it could further highlight the challenge of anticipating heat's indirect effects on our health. For example, researchers cautioned against using the data to draw a direct link between hotter temperatures and more poison-related illness. 'The mechanisms might not be clear to us, but it still could reflect a very complex interaction between heat and people's behavior that causes this rise,' Meade added. Ebi also noted that the analyses didn't consider other factors, such as wildfires, which are drivers of cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses and mortality, especially in California. 'Climate change is increasing the numbers of wildfires, which could have influenced the results because wildfires are often associated with hot days,' she said. She also pointed out that the data ends in 2017, which means it missed many large, extreme heat waves over the last 7½ years that could have altered the way we respond to heat exposure. Gould hopes the data will help public health officials broaden their understanding of who needs to be protected during heat waves. 'Deaths are of course the most severe outcome, and protecting deaths is one of the single largest priorities of public health,' he said. 'But these illnesses can affect kids, working families, reduce our productivity and strain our hospitals and communities.' 'Even when heat doesn't kill,' said Gould, 'it hurts a lot.' - - - Kevin Crowe contributed to this report. Related Content Kamala Harris will not run for California governor, opening door for 2028 run The U.S. military is investing in this Pacific island. So is China. In a stressful human world, 'mermaiding' gains popularity in D.C. area Solve the daily Crossword
