Robots In Healthcare: Why This Changes Everything For The Future Of Medicine

Robots in healthcare are no longer science fiction — they're being deployed in hospitals and aged care facilities right now, and the countries that move first will shape the global standards. In this episode I break down the real safety, privacy and cybersecurity risks of robots in healthcare settings, from the fall problem to the walking surveillance concern, and explain why New Zealand is uniquely positioned to lead. Whether you're excited or nervous about robots in healthcare, this is the conversation we need to be having before the technology arrives on our doorstep.

This episode is proudly sponsored by MitoSynergy Copper 1+. Most copper supplements use poorly absorbed oxidised forms. MitoSynergy’s patented BioCopper1 (Cunermuspir) delivers reduced copper (Cu1+) directly to your mitochondria, supporting ATP production at cytochrome c oxidase. I’ve been personally testing MitoActivator EX and have noticed a real difference in training power and energy output. Try it here — 10% off with this link.

The Healthcare Crisis No One Can Solve

Well, hi everyone. Welcome to my channel. Today I’m going to be talking about robots coming to healthcare and why I need one.

Every morning I have to wake up multiple times during the night and in the morning early, not because I want to, but because I have to. I have a mom, Isabelle, who’s been severely disabled for over a decade now. She needs 24/7 care. That means night checks, medication schedules, lifting, feeding, monitoring — every single day without a break.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you this because there are millions of people around the world just like me. Exhausted caregivers who are holding the healthcare system together with their bare hands. And the system is breaking.

Today I want to talk to you about something that most people in the health and wellness space aren’t talking about yet — physical AI, actual robots, in particular humanoid robots, and why I believe they’re going to transform healthcare within the next five to ten years, and why I believe New Zealand should be leading this charge.

The Numbers Are Staggering

Let’s start with the numbers because the scale of this is staggering. The World Health Organization projects a global shortage of at least 10 million healthcare workers by 2030. That’s just around the corner. Some projections put it as high as 15 million.

Right now, nearly 60% of the global population lacks access to essential health services. Not because the knowledge doesn’t exist, not because the drugs aren’t available, but because there simply aren’t enough humans to deliver the care. And it’s getting worse, not better.

The world’s population is aging at an unprecedented rate. In the US alone, the over-65 population has grown from 12% in 2004 to 18% today. By 2030, one in five Americans will be over 65. Seven out of ten of them will eventually need long-term care.

Here in New Zealand, we’re facing the same trajectory. We currently have around 900,000 people aged 65 or older — nearly 18% of our population. Stats New Zealand projects we’ll hit 1 million by 2028 or 2029. And by 2048, nearly a quarter of our entire population will be over 65.

Meanwhile, the people needed to look after this aging population are disappearing. New Zealand’s health system currently has roughly 8,000 vacancies. Our government’s own workforce plan identified that we need an extra 13,000 nurses and over 5,000 additional doctors within the next decade. And that’s just to keep up.

We have the highest rate of foreign-trained nurses in the OECD. We’re already more dependent on importing healthcare workers than almost any other developed country, and we’re competing against every other nation for the same shrinking pool of people.

The Caregiver Crisis

In the United States, 63 million Americans are now family caregivers. That’s one in four adults. That number has increased by nearly 50% since 2015. 40% of those caregivers report providing what’s classified as high-intensity care and 30% have been doing it for five years or more. I sit in that bucket — 10 years and high-intensity care.

The paid caregiving workforce is in even worse shape. Turnover rates for home care aides routinely hit 70 to 80% within the first 100 days. These workers are paid barely more than fast food employees. Home health aides in the US average around $16.82 an hour despite doing work that requires more training and carries enormous emotional and physical weight. Over half of them rely on some sort of public assistance.

We have more people needing care, fewer people available to provide it. The people who do provide it are burned out, underpaid, and undervalued. And the cost is skyrocketing while the quality is declining. No amount of recruitment drives, visa programs, or pay increases is going to solve a problem of this magnitude. We need a fundamentally different approach. And that’s where physical AI comes in.

Robots Are Already In Hospitals

When most people think of AI in healthcare, they think about digital AI — chatbots, diagnostic algorithms, medical imaging analysis. Those things are important, absolutely. But there’s a whole other dimension that most people aren’t paying attention to yet — physical AI, actual robots operating in actual hospitals doing actual work alongside nurses and doctors and carers.

Let me introduce you to a robot called Moxy. Moxy is made by a company called Diligent Robotics out of Austin, Texas. It’s a semi-humanoid with a friendly face, a single arm for grabbing things, and it moves around on wheels. It’s already deployed in over 25 hospitals across the United States.

Moxy delivers medication, transports lab samples, restocks supplies, collects soiled linens — all the tasks that nurses currently spend up to 30% of their time doing. Tasks that keep them away from actually caring for patients.

The results have been remarkable. Moxy has completed over 1 million deliveries. It’s saved hospital staff close to 600,000 hours. At Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, Moxy reduced nurse walking by nearly 300 miles within weeks of deployment. Nurses reported getting back approximately 30 minutes per shift that they could then redirect to actual patient care.

And the staff love it. They give the robots names, decorate them for holidays, and some units have even given Moxy employee of the week awards. This isn’t replacing healthcare workers. It’s liberating them from the drudge work so they can do more of what they’re actually trained to do.

Tesla Optimus & The Humanoid Revolution

Moxy is just the beginning. The next generation isn’t going to be robots on wheels with one arm. The next generation is fully humanoid robots. Two legs, two arms, human-sized, capable of navigating any environment that a human can navigate — stairs, doorways, elevators, cramped hospital rooms, people’s homes.

And the biggest player in this race is Tesla. If you’ve been following my conversations with Cern Basher on this channel, you’ll know I’ve been diving deep into what Tesla is building with Optimus and the pace of development in the last 12 months has been quite extraordinary.

The Tesla Optimus robot, currently in its second generation with the third generation being unveiled soon, stands 5’8”, weighs around 57 kilos, and has hands with 22 degrees of freedom that can handle delicate objects. It’s powered by the same AI architecture that runs Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system.

Right now, Optimus is deployed inside Tesla’s own factories sorting battery cells, handling parts, managing inventory. Tesla’s Fremont factory is being repurposed to become a dedicated Optimus manufacturing facility and they’re targeting production costs of around $20,000 to $30,000 per unit at scale.

Think about that. A humanoid robot that costs less than a new car, operates 24 hours a day, doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get sick, doesn’t need holidays, and continuously improves through fleet learning where every robot shares what it learns with every other robot.

The Caregiver’s Reality

I’ve been caring for my mom for over a decade now. She suffered a massive health crisis that left her severely disabled, and then she had brain cancer and hip fractures and sepsis and everything else known to man. The journey to keep her alive and keep her quality of life has consumed my world.

I want to paint you a picture of what caregiving actually looks like day to day, because nobody gets it unless they’ve lived it.

It means being on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no holidays, no days off. It means setting alarms through the night to check on her. It means managing complex medications, monitoring vital signs, handling feeding, managing hygiene — tasks that require knowledge, physical strength, and constant vigilance.

It means I can’t travel freely. My ability to work is constrained. My income has come from things I can do from home or get in and out of quickly. Every conference, every business opportunity has to be weighed against “can I get there and back fast enough” and “who’s going to cover mum while I’m gone.”

And I’m one of the lucky ones. I have resources. I have deep knowledge in this area. I have a health background. But imagine the millions of people doing this without any of that.

What I Can See Coming

I’m not naive about where this technology is today. An Optimus robot isn’t going to walk into my mum’s room tomorrow and take over her care. We’re a couple of years away from that. Maybe a couple more. But it’s not that far away.

Imagine a humanoid robot that can monitor vital signs through the night and alert you only when something needs attention so you actually get to sleep. That would be huge for me. I have to get up every hour and a half every night. The toll on my health is huge.

Imagine a robot that can assist with transfers — helping someone from bed to wheelchair, wheelchair to bathroom — tasks that cause back injuries in human caregivers every single day.

Imagine a robot that can prepare and deliver meals on schedule, fetch medications at the right time, provide a constant watchful presence so that the human caregiver, the family member, can leave the house, go to work, have a life without the constant terror that something will go wrong while they’re away.

That future isn’t fantasy. The components are being built right now. The question isn’t whether it will happen — it’s when it happens, where it happens first, and who leads the way.

Why New Zealand Should Lead

This is where I believe it should be New Zealand. We should be leading the charge.

First, we have a unified national health system. Health New Zealand coordinates care delivery across the entire country. They’ve also just stood up a dedicated AI and innovation unit called HealthX with strong political backing and an ambitious 10-year digital investment plan. There’s appetite at every level — from clinicians to administrators to ministers — to innovate.

Second, we have manageable scale. We’re a country of 5.3 million people. Small enough to run meaningful pilots without the complexity and bureaucratic nightmare of doing this in the US or the UK, but large enough for the results to be credible and transferable.

Third, we’re an English-speaking, politically stable, globally trusted country. We have a track record of being a testing ground for new ideas. When I was a teenager, we were at the forefront of EFTPOS and fibre optics. We were one of the first countries in the world to give women the vote. We were early adopters of social welfare. We’re seen internationally as a safe and sensible, forward-thinking country.

Fourth — and this is the key point — we’re not a threat to anyone. Nobody’s worried about New Zealand gaining some geopolitical advantage from having robots in hospitals. That makes us the perfect neutral ground for proving that this technology works safely, ethically, and in the interest of patients.

Think about what Tesla did with Robotaxi in Austin, Texas. Austin became the proving ground, the place where the technology was tested, validated, and refined before it could be rolled out anywhere else. New Zealand could be the Austin of healthcare robotics.

But Is It Safe? The Real Concerns

I know what you’re thinking. Robots in hospitals, robots in homes — are they actually safe? It’s a very legitimate question. Let me give you an honest answer.

There are five real concerns.

Physical safety. These things weigh around 57 kilos and if they lose power, they collapse. A humanoid robot face-planted at a trade show last year with no warning. Tesla’s answer is force-limiting — the robot physically cannot exert enough force to seriously injure you — plus collision detection and emergency stops. And ISO is writing brand new safety standards specifically for walking robots right now. That’s never existed before.

Cybersecurity. A humanoid in your home is a mobile device with cameras, microphones, and physical strength. If someone hacks it, they don’t just have your data — they have a physical presence in your space. The new 2025 safety standards include cybersecurity requirements for the first time. And Tesla has years of vehicle cybersecurity infrastructure to build on. But this area is still behind where it needs to be.

Privacy. This one got me. Researchers found a Chinese-made humanoid transmitting data to servers in China. We don’t want that type of thing going on. We don’t want anything to be able to control your robot or your data and how it’s trained.

Regulation. There are currently no specific safety standards for humanoid robots in homes. They’re being written right now, and whoever helps write them shapes the entire industry.

And that’s exactly the opportunity for New Zealand. The countries that get involved early don’t just get the economic benefit — they shape the rules. That’s why a healthcare pilot makes sense. Controlled environment, trained staff, clear protocols. You build the safety evidence, then you scale. We’re not being naive about the risks. We’re being strategic enough to turn them into our advantage.

The Conversation We Need To Have

I hope this episode gave you much food for thought. We need deep conversations around all of this — from the lived experience, from someone who has been in the hospitals more times than I care to remember.

Our system in New Zealand has a lot of problems. There are some fantastic people doing fantastic work, but we are very resource-constrained. Whenever we’re in the emergency department in New Plymouth, it’s like a MASH centre in the middle of a war zone. We have bottlenecks, we have problems, we have not enough workers, not enough resources. This could be one answer.

I’m excited that we have, for the first time, people that are actually interested in getting something like this going in New Zealand. I applaud that. Let’s have an open conversation.

Please do make some comments down below. What are your thoughts? I have a vested interest in it because I’ve lived the experience of being a caregiver and I know how powerful this could be. The stats that are coming at us — we’ve got to do something now. There are going to be more and more older people facing dire situations alone with no support, and that is not acceptable.

Thank you very much for listening today. I really appreciate it. Please give us a like, a subscribe, listen to my podcast Pushing the Limits or on my YouTube channel. I really appreciate it and thanks for your time today.