For now, most of the mobile robots, sometimes called telepresence robots, are little more than ventriloquists’ dummies with long, invisible strings. But some models have artificial intelligence that lets them do some things on their own, and they will inevitably grow smarter and more agile. They will not only represent the human users, they will augment them.

“The beauty of mobile telepresence is it challenges the notion of what it means to be somewhere,” said Colin Angle, chief executive of one of the largest robot manufacturers, iRobot.

The robot is what allowed Dr. Shatzel to “be” in the patient’s room far away. From an earlier telephone conversation with the emergency room doctor, the patient’s condition had not been clear. But in speaking directly with the patient, examining his face and control of his hands and glancing with the camera at the cardiac monitor in the room, Dr. Shatzel could assess the stroke, he said, with the same acuity as if he were there. He instructed the staff to administer the drug.

“We had a good outcome,” he said later.

Dr. John Whapham, a Loyola University neurologist who has helped create several regional networks providing telemedicine with robots made by InTouch Health, says that when he began using the robot during his residency, he would carry his laptop in a backpack so he could perform consultations anytime.

“I’ll pull out the laptop, and when I’m on Michigan Avenue here in Chicago, put it on a garbage can or on the seat of a bus stop,” he said. “You’re live, and you can walk around, examine, image, zoom in and out. I do it all the time.”

Expanding the Workplace

“I’m very thin in this new outfit,” Mike Beltzner says, breaking the ice in a room of Silicon Valley computer programmers. In the flesh, he is 2,200 miles away, at home in Toronto with his cat. But at this meeting his face appears on a 15-inch LCD atop a narrow aluminum machine resembling an upright vacuum cleaner. Indeed, as this robot rolls around the room it looks as if it could just as easily be sweeping.