Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence hold a promise for the radical transformation of healthcare services. Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that robots are crucial allies during pandemics. Yet, the adoption of these technologies is impeded by concerns related to cybersecurity issues. Indeed, cyberattacks already had dire physical repercussions in healthcare, leading to delayed treatments and death of patients. The rise of such cybersecurity incidents is a timely reminder that not only the volume of attacks is increasing but their diversity is also expanding, posing a significant threat towards disrupting clinical care delivery. While ongoing research activities in both robotics and artificial intelligence fields, focus essentially on the safe and appropriate use of surgical, service, or logistics robotics operating in healthcare spaces, cybersecurity aspects are not sufficiently well covered in the research community.
The growing range of security threats and requirements has recently forced organizations from all over the world to intensify their investments in new safety solutions. Besides, regulations are also in favour of a growing need for guidelines and resilient commercial products. Nevertheless, cybersecurity is one of the most constrained sectors in the labour market, both worldwide and at the European level
The RESPECT project objective is to create a sustainable European and inter-sectoral network of organisations working on a joint research programme aiming to design and develop concrete defense strategies to ensure secure, safe, resilient and privacy-preserving operation of indoor mobile robotics solutions for logistic applications in healthcare environments. Safety ensures that the robots will not harm patients while security ensures that the robots and their embedded software may not be attacked. A resilient medical robotic system is a system that can adapt to significant changes in the environment. Privacy-preservation ensures the protection of patients and users medical and personal data.
Specifically the main research objectives of the project are: (i) Explore and identify system-specific both cyber and physical weaknesses posing security, privacy, and safety threats, in autonomous mobile robots operating in a healthcare environment; (ii) Analyse surfaced vulnerability issues in conjunction with projected threats and propose defence measures and mitigation strategies towards safeguarding mobile robots operation. (iii) Define and standardize a minimal set of vulnerability testing procedures and guidelines leveraging and extending the Robot Security Framework, that ensures safe and autonomous robotic fleet management in a “safety-critical setting.
The project is implemented through staff exchanges among different organizations with complementary expertise in cybersecurity, healthcare, cloud computing and robotics from 5 countries across EU promoting transfer of knowledge between industry and academia.
