Chris Helson provides an insight into the arrival of collaborative robots – known as cobots – into sterile services departments. In this article, Chris outlines how this innovative technology could disrupt the status quo and transform pre-cleaning and inspection processes.
For more than a century, surgical instrument decontamination has advanced through successive waves of automation. Washing, disinfection, sterilisation and traceability are now validated, repeatable and tightly controlled. Yet two critical processes have remained largely untouched by this progress, pre-cleaning and inspection.
Both sit outside formal automation, both are challenging and technically difficult, both rely heavily on human judgement. And together, they represent the largest remaining sources of variability and risk in the decontamination pathway. That status quo is now being challenged by the arrival of collaborative robots — cobots — in sterile services.
Tiny Air, a Scottish medical technology company, has introduced the world's first fully automated, validated pre-cleaning cobot and is now developing an inspection cobot to address the final manual weak point. Together, these systems mark a shift from task-based manual work to system-level assurance.
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