CES 2012 – Forget hospital Matrons – here comes Ava the healthcare robot from iRobot

The Japanese have been using personal robots to monitor people’s health for many years, but now it seems like we might be about to start catching up.

At CES 2012 iRobot,the company that makes the Roomba home-cleaning robots, was parading its Ava bot, a three-to-five-foot tall robot with an Apple iPad for a head.

There are a number of potential uses for the bot, an obvious one is facilitating video conversations between people in remote locations, but its main use could well turn out to be medical, using this functionality in a health care environment. The bot is being customized by the company InTouch Health for use in healthcare facilities, where it may be used by doctors to interact with patients using video. With the number of medical apps being developed for the iPad it may also be able to undertake basic observations such as blood pressure, temperature etc.

Here’s a video of the bot in action.