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Elected Bay Area Government Officials San Francisco Bay Area Subject: The Emergence of Hospital Automation and

RoboticsWith Implications of Future Labor Needs and Immigration. Elected Officials: Issues involving immigration, which we have recently seen impacting our individual Bay Area communities, have been driven in large part by murky projections of future labor needs in the Bay Area by parties that are more or less unknown, and out of the publics eye. The exact nature of what the future labor force will be is not likely to be understood for decades to come. To date, ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) has not been very forthcoming as to its methodologies for determining future population growth, based in part on the labor needs of our future regional economy. The benefits of technology, when applied to the business, and health care, sectors offer the possibilities of reducing the number of employees needed to perform servicesreducing, quite possibly, the need for a growing population (feed by immigration) to produce the goods and services needed by the SF.BayArea in the 2020s and 2030s. One sector of our economy, the health care sector, has been growing to the point that it will quite possibly consume 20% of our GDP by 2020. These alarming cost increases have not fully been understood by the public at large, although cost tracking demonstrates that labor costs within the system have been a significant driver of these cost increases. Additionally, an aging population,in a society where there has been a breakdown of the nuclear family, raises issues about how the US will care for people who might well live significantly longer than they do now. This communication is a quick look at how hospitals are reducing costs today, and improving health care quality, via the introduction of information technology (IT) and robotics ------

First Generation Hospital Robot Video-media: Healthcare Technology Outlook 2020 - Technology uptake http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=totMfYaq8O8 UCLA - Remote Presence Robots in ICU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRx7CdseGsQ Saint Joseph Health System- Remote Presence Robotics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVGREGoC3E4 "Tug", the El Camino Hospital robot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqdE9QLjUOs 7News : Hospital robots helping patients: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AeEK7Vjcdw Cleaner robots blast hospital bugs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByO4GLGFmJE Robots as pharmacists? www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQGSk3Lt9X0 The Intelligent Hospital Pharmacy in the Intelligent Hospital http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5IGrqpTd0g BCHS (Brant Community Healthcare System) Lab Automation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Vae1MKEJI Consis E robot by Willach Pharmacy Solutions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MobGmJ-Wx0M Swisslog's Introduction Video for the RoboCourier(TM) Mobile Robot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcD2leYbhxk Orbis' swisslog robot - Attention automatic transport http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX_YvLlot6c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C44zgA6edsA Pharmacy Automation Solutions and Hospital Materials Transport Swisslog Automation Systems at St Olavs Hospital http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rutHGN4IMB8 Print-media: The Robots Are Coming to Hospitals: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577281350525870934.html In the next few years, thousands of "service robots" are expected to enter the health-care sectorpicture R2D2 from "Star Wars" carrying a tray of medications or a load of laundry down hospital corridors. "My guess is that in five years, there will be 10 times the number of robots deployed in hospitals that there are today," said Donald Jones, a managing director at Draper Triangle Ventures, who is backing privately held robotics company Aethon Inc. "We are just not going to have enough human hands to do all the work."

Xenex UV Light Robots Make Veterans Affairs Hospitals Safer:

http://www.pcbdesign007.com/pages/zone.cgi?a=94642 The Xenex robot uses a pulsed xenon lamp to emit germicidal ultraviolet light. Within a 5-10 minute cleaning cycle per room, this intense, broadspectrum light destroys viruses, bacteria and bacterial spores. The robotic device produces ultraviolet C (UV-C), which penetrates the cell walls of bacteria, viruses, mold, fungus and spores, causing the pathogens DNA to fuse instantly, rendering them unable to reproduce or mutate. Without contact or chemicals, the Xenex robots pulsed xenon light kills harmful microorganisms safely and effectively. Conclusion The emergence of these new technologies is clearly setting the stage for a revamping of the health care sectorfrom a people-centric, often error-prone, service/delivery of care model to one that is heavily invested in IT, sophisticated systems design, and robotics, to reduce costs and decrease human errors which currently result in about 100,000 unnecessary deaths per year in US hospitals. Beneath these issues, there is the never-ending problem of labor availability, cost escalation, and the occurrences of work stoppages by organized labor. Some public planners have projected the need for tens of millions of immigrants to fill the ranks of the US labor system, which would seem to be very short-sighted, given the rapid evolution that we can expect to see in the area of robotics, IT, wireless communications, software, and the energy, and genius, of the US private sector. This sort communication is only intended to remind our SF.BayArea elected officials that the future is not going to be a projection of today, just bigger and more expensive. There is every reason to believe that we will see an increased use of robotics in every sector of the US economy (as will every industrialized country). The impact of this automation needs to be clearly recognized, and factored into any growth estimates that are discussed, and ultimately, approved by government. Please take the time to review these videos, and perhaps even do a little research on your ownusing Youtube and Google. The future of the SF.BayArea does not have to be one that sees our residential communities replaced with Manhattan-styled high-rises, where people are boxed into living quarters that are not substantially different than those of the overly urbanized cities of the East Coast. Elected officials, such as yourselves, need to be aware of the technological advances that are going to change the way we work,

and live, in the coming yearsso that you can properly represent all of the people in this part of California.

Wayne Martin Palo Alto, CA 09.12.13 www.scribd.com/wmartin46 www.twitter.com/wmartin46 www.youtube.com/wmartin46

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