A Chinese medical graduate student has built a robot to bring acupuncture into the 21st century. As greater spending power threatens to make time-honoured remedies obsolete, Acubots is merging tech advances and age-old practices for those who value progress as well as tradition.

Tucked into the pockets of 44 million people in the US alone, iPhones have become our lives – and now they could save them, too. Apple’s ResearchKit is a platform for creating apps that collect medical data and it's got potential to completely alter personalised medicine and mobile health.

Machines can now diagnose congenital cataracts, a rare eye condition, with a similar success rate to trained doctors. But doctors won't be put out of a job just yet – people tend to be more forgiving of humans than machines, and have plenty of trust issues to work through.

As our lives become more automated, the consumer robotics industry is only set to grow. But something is holding the market back – people find it difficult to trust these machines, especially in their homes and offices. Why do they make us uneasy, and what will convince people to trust robots?