Researcher identified logistical bottleneck in the provision of TCM care. From half a day we went to a maximum of 8 minutes.
One robot diagnosis and production of Traditional Chinese Medicine (MTC) developed in Macau will begin to be officially used in Portugal, with its eyes set on Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking markets.
Known as Herbizon, It’s a robot that produces MTC drinks herbal and is based on technology jointly developed between the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST), and a TCM laboratory established in the special economic zone of neighboring Hengqin (Mountain Island) by Guangdong TCM University.
According to the project manager, after overcome a year of testing at a clinic in Lisbon, the robot will be formally launched in April 17 na Egas Moniz School of Health & Sciences, em Almada.
Hon Chitin, researcher at MUST’s Faculty of Innovation Engineering, said the robot responds to the lack of qualified professionals in TCM in rural or more remote areas.
The project originated in 2023, when Hon identified a logistical bottleneck in providing TCM care.
“Traditionally, the preparation of a single TCM prescription requires the collection of raw herbs and yours cooking during a period that may reach five hours, whether at home or in a hospital. It usually takes at least midday”, said Hon, noting that quality TCM medical resources in China are often concentrated in large cities.
The professor then devised a system that could provide a “standardized and quality TCM service” in rural or distant areas, automating both the evaluation and preparation of the drink.
Hon’s engineering approach was inspired by a 1,000-square-meter manufacturing facility in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which used a large mechanical arm to sort more than a thousand types of herbs.
“I thought, If they can operate by machine, we can do it in small“, recalled Hon.
The resulting device, manufactured in the city of Zhongshan in Guangdong province, condensed industrial capacity into a single box.
The system generated an internal library of 14 smart tea formulasselected from more than 1,300 substances, and can deliver a personalized herbal drink in three to eight minutes.
The artificial intelligence that operates Herbizon is based on a large-scale language model trained on extensive medical literature and ancient classics, integrated with the DeepSeek Pro model.
According to Hon, this digital brain was designed to solve the chronic problem of diagnostic inconsistency in TCM, where different doctors often reach different conclusions for the same patient.
“We want it to be stable and consistent”, he explained to Lusa. “Same person, same diagnosis, same result, even if repeated five times“, he added.
The robot performs this task by integrating four classic diagnostic methods — inspection of the face and tongue, auscultation, investigation and pulse analysis — through multimodal perception.
In order to commercialize the project, the company Zhuhai Herbizon Technology Co., Ltd. was created, with the system currently protected by more than 10 patented technologies and 50 registered trademarks.
According to Hon, although the robot is already active in 20 locations in China, the Portuguese trial serves as a regulatory indicator as the device is licensed in Portugal as a beverage dispenser, rather than a medical instrument.
Hon noted that although acupuncture is widely accepted in the West, herbal medicine still faces a scrutiny more rigorous as it relates to the digestive system.
“A regulation will be more restrictive”, said, although he maintains that, for this machine, “the quality of the entire process” is guaranteed.
Hon sees the robot as a way to bridge the gap between Western medicine, which relies on clinical trials for single targets, and TCM, which approaches problems from multiple angles and across multiple human organs.
“It’s a mixture of many things in terms of chemical”, said Hon.
After the trial in Lisbon, the team intends to focus on the mainland China market for two to three years to gain scale, before returning to expand into Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking markets.
The robot will be presented on the same day as the first Symposium for the Development of High Quality of TCM in Portugal, organized by the Portuguese Society of Chinese Medicine.
The event should include the signing of the Lisbon Consensus 2026, a document that aims to establish Portugal as a European platform for TCM.
