TL;DR

A Dundee GP practice has trialled a knee-high robot that greets patients where they wait, then walks them through blood pressure, oxygen saturation and weight measurements before the doctor sees them. Twelve cardiovascular patients took part over two days, and the practice reports consultation time halved. Researchers behind it say the bigger obstacle is not the technology but the absence of any national plan for deploying it.

What the machine actually does

Teme, built by scientists at Heriot-Watt University’s National Robotarium, collects the routine information that opens almost every appointment. It introduces itself, leads the patient into a consulting room, explains how to unwrap the cuff and where to rest their arm, then prints the readings for the nurse or GP.

Dr Gillian Chin, whose practice ran the trial, put the case in terms of what it frees up rather than what it replaces: the doctor already has the numbers when the patient sits down, so the appointment can be spent talking. She estimated half of consultation time recovered. One patient, a 72-year-old attending annual checks since a 2018 cardiac arrest, described it as odd at first and then unremarkable.

Not everything landed. Some participants disliked being addressed by a machine out among other patients, a privacy objection about the setting rather than the machine. It also currently speaks with an American accent — a detail that reads differently after this week’s finding that an AI phone receptionist could not follow broad Yorkshire speech.

The professional bodies want a boundary

Royal College of GPs Scotland accepts a supporting role for robots on simple tasks. Its vice chair, Chris Williams, said technology ought to back clinicians rather than substitute for them, and that no machine reproduces the relationship between patient and doctor. The Royal College of Nursing’s Colin Poolman welcomed the investment on the same condition.

Looking forward

Professor Cristina Tealdi, an economist on the project, identified the real gap: implementation is scattered, most pilots are privately funded, and nobody is gathering evidence on what delivers value to patients. Lisa Farrell of the National Robotarium said Japan and the United States have moved faster, and that Britain now needs the political will to follow.

Health Secretary Angela Constance pointed to existing commitments including AI-supported physiotherapy and £1.8m for a digital dermatology service available to every GP. Neither is a robotics strategy, which is precisely the point being made.