Servicing robotics used by international clients can be a costly venture under typical circumstances. A failed hard drive or a tweak to the robot’s code can potentially require having a company technician fly across the world to perform what amounts to a 10-minute repair or upgrade.
This was the challenge for Interactive Motion Technologies, based in Boston. It sells neurorehabilitation robots for hospitals that assist patients move their limbs even if they’ve had moderate to severe strokes. Taking advantage of the brain’s neuroplasticity, an InMotion robot can guide a patient’s arm through a range of motions, assisting the movements as needed. These motions cause the brain to rewire its neurons, and relearn how to control the body in time.
However, many of these robots sold to hospitals are run from old Linux code that doesn’t easily connect to the Internet, and servicing a robot can be a costly affair given that InMotion clients are based all over the world.
To solve this problem of costly repairs and updates, InMotion turned to Opengear (News - Alert) and its out of band management technology. Using the Opengear ACM5004-G-E, InMotion can perform remote maintenance of robots in hospitals all over the world from the company’s headquarters in Boston by connecting to them via a cellular connection.
“We call the Opengear product a miracle,” said Dr. Daniel M. Drucker, a scientist at Interactive Motion. “It feels like magic.”
He added: “Now I’m here in Boston, type a couple commands, and a minute later I’m connected and able to issue commands on this robot. And it’s going over the global cell network.”
Since Opengear’s connection is not Internet-based but cellular, its gateway provides secure tunneling so that the security of the older systems still in use is protected.
It also is relatively cheap to service; all that is needed is a $20 per month cellular service to maintain access, far below what it costs to send a technician out in the field.
“The trouble and costs of traveling internationally for trivial maintenance issues are exactly the kind of burden our cellular out-of-band gateways with secure tunneling are designed to solve,” noted Rick Stevenson, Opengear CEO. “All Interactive Motion had to do was ship the gateways with instructions to plug them in. Now, the ACM5004-G-E makes it so their technicians can access the robots from home, and they’re doing nine out of every 10 service calls with no travel required.”
Servicing robots just got a lot easier.
Edited by Alisen Downey