Robots may one day rise up to destroy us, but these days they’re proving quite helpful, especially in medicine. Robotic surgery has developed rapidly over the past decade, and now, robots are helping patients recover too.

For the last four months, Boston Children’s Hospital has been sending some of its young patients home with a sleek, two-wheeled robot called VGo (VEE-go). With a camera, audio equipment, and an LCD screen, VGo is essentially a teleconferencing system on wheels, and doctors at Boston Children’s are using it to check in on their young patients from afar.

Wow! And what's the biggest hangup? Spotty wi-fi coverage.

Hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping to curb medical error, have invested heavily to put computers, smartphones and other devices into the hands of medical staff for instant access to patient data, drug information and case studies.

But like many cures, this solution has come with an unintended side effect: doctors and nurses can be focused on the screen and not the patient, even during moments of critical care. And they are not always doing work; examples include a neurosurgeon making personal calls during an operation, a nurse checking airfares during surgery and a poll showing that half of technicians running bypass machines had admitted texting during a procedure.

Over at the New York Times, an article about the distractions iPads and iPhones and other devices can cause for medical staff. Hard to laugh this one off, as plenty of evidence is offered, but I've got to say I trust doctors to do what they're supposed to be doing and believe that they have the sense to stay focused. Sort of like the current move to ban all cell phone use by drivers. There's plenty of distractions for a driver besides a phone, and we won't automatically be safer just because the phones are supposed to be eliminated.

Nguyen envisions robots that will be able to measure blood pressure, take a pulse, and conduct blood and urine tests, sending the information to hospital personnel for review. Robots could also be used to monitor home-bound elderly patients who can’t make it to hospitals for checkups.

@RosabethKanter steered me to this one over at Twitter. It's kind of hard for me to imagine letting a robot draw blood.

But the rest of America will most likely be left out of all this. Millions are still offline completely, while others can afford only connections over their phone lines or via wireless smartphones. They can thus expect even lower-quality health services, career opportunities, education and entertainment options than they already receive.

The Times had a heartbreaking article on the digital divide in Sunday's edition and had some eye-opening facts on how the move to technology-based services would affect those without access to technology. I was really taken by assertions about regulatory policy in he United States:

The answer to this puzzle is regulatory policy. Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers. The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight.

By contrast, governments that have intervened in high-speed Internet markets have seen higher numbers of people adopting the technology, doing so earlier and at lower subscription charges.

I'd really like to see a response from the business and anti-regulation (and anti health care reform) proponents. Maybe there will be a selection of responses next Sunday.