RE Log Fall 2016

24 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2016 Vita is one of DANIEL STEVEN SANCHEZ’s most dependable colleagues. He never goes anywhere without his stethoscope. As he makes hospital rounds, he is always on schedule – down to the minute. He collects data faster than most, and absolutely never forgets a patient’s name. Vita, who stands five feet, six inches tall, has a screen for a head, a touch- screen on his chest and glowing wheels for feet. He is a robot or, more precisely, a Virtual and Independent Telemedicine Assistant. Sanchez, Director of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering at InTouch Health in Santa Barbara, has helped create and refine the internal architecture of various robots including Vita, some 200 of which provide patient care at hospitals worldwide. Sanchez holds more than two dozen patents related to robot design, a technology so cutting edge that one of Sanchez’s patents governs the “social behavior rules” for medical robots. Vita’s most important function is to assist with quick assessments of stroke patients, for whom speedy care and accurate diagnoses are criti- cal, but the robot can help in a variety of other ways. “The most reward- ing thing is that it’s improving people’s lives and saving lives,” Sanchez said. Thanks to internal hospital maps, obstacle-detection technology and 3-D cameras, Vita can buzz through hospital corridors and perform many tasks without human assistance. Vita carries an electronic stethoscope and high-definition camera with optical zoom. By bending its head close to a stroke patient’s eyeballs, Vita offers a physician at a remote location access to an eye scan that offers critical information. Doctors, who can guide Vita remotely, communicate directly with pa- tients by speaking to them through the screen on Vita’s face. Sanchez has been designing robots since he arrived to Harvard in 1993. While working towards a double major in electrical and mechanical engineering, Sanchez landed a job at the school’s robotics labora- tory, where his passion took off as he helped graduate students complete their dissertations. “I stayed in that robotics lab the whole time I was at Harvard,” he said. “I wanted a career in robotics.” He knew he had found his life calling in his earliest days at Computer Motion, a Santa Barbara-based company that hired him out of college, when he walked into a laboratory at a company warehouse and watched a robot perform surgery on a pig. That, he thought, looked cool. Robots were already assisting in many industries – why shouldn’ t they also help physi- cians work better and more efficiently? At Computer Motion, which later merged with Intuitive Surgical, Sanchez helped create robots that enhanced the fine-motor skills of surgeons, using magnification and scaling to allow them to perform surgeries in the tiniest of regions with the tiniest of instruments that couldn’t otherwise be performed by hand. The company is now worth $24 billion. “The surgeon could comfortably sit down, look at a magnified view of the anatomy, and mimic what he would do in open surgery,” Sanchez said. “You can operate on blood vessels that are 1 millimeter in diameter.” In 2007, Sanchez joined InTouch Health and began working on the Vita project. Sanchez spends his days thinking about how to make Vita even more useful to doctors and hospitals. It’s a rewarding thing, living out your boyhood dreams while helping people around the globe. Vita “is saving lives,” Sanchez said. “It enables more people to get care, when they wouldn’t [otherwise] be able to get specialist care.” DANIEL STEVEN SANCHEZ ’93 Director of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering at InTouch Health Harvard University, BS Engineering Sciences, Electrical and Mechanical Memorable teacher, class: Dr. Walid El Khoury, Multivariable Calculus and Fractals engineering The most rewarding thing is that it’s improving people’s lives and saving lives.