A technological innovation can improve a product, a process, or a methodology, or it can introduce a completely new one. Automating manufacturing technologies has brought many advantages to industrial processes, and these advantages can also be seen in bioscience laboratories. Laboratory 4.0 opens new possibilities for scientists.
What is Laboratory 4.0?
Laboratories and work environments in the future are likely to include intelligent automation systems, robotics, and digitalization. With the use of digital technology, we can collect data, identify trends, automate processes, and make better decisions. By improving processes, lab technicians can provide more reliable, reproducible, and scalable results. In combination, these benefits enable analytical laboratories, for example, to provide their clients with a more efficient and cost-effective service.
Benefits
- Results that are delivered more quickly and with greater accuracy: manual entry accounts for most errors. Machines and robotics are the best tools for eliminating human error. Plus, increase productivity of the lab by running more experiments in less time.
- Reduction in costs: the automated lab can take on additional workloads without increasing staffing levels. Though automation tools can be expensive in the short-term, they save you money in the long-term.
- Employee satisfaction increases: lab employees can work on more impactful applications when the burden of repetitive and tedious tasks is removed.
- The trend towards globalization has an impact on laboratories that collaborate across multiple sites in a particular way.
Trends
- Big Data / Predictive Analytics / Connected Lab: This term is applied to data volumes that are too big, too complex, and too fast to be analyzed by traditional means.
- The Internet of Things ("IoT") is a concept that simply refers to technologies that enable everyday objects and machines to communicate with one another. Sensors, software, and/or other technologies allow the objects to be connected via the internet to other devices and systems.
- Visual processes / Virtual Reality: These are technologies that use image-processing sensors to facilitate the interplay of objects, humans, and machines.
- In robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent behavior is automated and machine learning is done. Robotics is a subfield of artificial intelligence.
- Speech recognition / Lab assistants: Technology used to make spoken language accessible to computers.
As a result of this new level of automation, scientists can interact with experiments on a software level. Assays are planned and orchestrated on one screen, and they are run automatically so they can make accurate conclusions based on the accurate data.
Scientists can now relax and devote their time to work they enjoy: Using their training, understanding, and intuition that they spent years developing. Boredom, risks, and human error will also be obsolete, as will repetitive work that consumes 90% of their daily time.
Labs will no longer be constrained by human requirements. For example, this will mean a diagnostic lab can deliver results faster, new treatments can be discovered quicker and patients will receive better care.
For more information how our products are bringing automation to labs, read more about G.STATION, which allows scientists to create a protocol anytime from anywhere.
Book a demo with us today to learn how to automate your lab!