[music]
Miles O’Brien: Meet ARNA,
the Adaptive Robotic Nurse Assistant.
These student nurses are getting some hands-on training.
Dan Popa: The premise of the project
is that nurses need help to take care of patients.
Miles O’Brien: With support from the National
Science Foundation,
roboticist Dan Popa and a team of engineers
and nurses at the University of Louisville
are developing a new generation of assistive robots
designed to help nurses care for patients in a hospital.
Dan Popa: So, this is a nurse assistant,
not a nurse replacement.
So, to introduce a robot would essentially
improve both quality of care
and also help nurses complete their tasks more efficiently.
Miles O’Brien: By necessity,
nurses have to be master multi-taskers.
The idea is to put the robot to work assisting
with some of the more routine nursing tasks,
like fetching items or helping prevent falls.
Cindi Logsdon: Robots will never replace
the critical thinking
and the analysis that a professional nurse does,
but the robot could do some tasks
and help with some activities
that would free up the nurses’ time.
Miles O’Brien: This robot is
a “proof of concept”
design undergoing an initial round of testing
at a simulation lab in the School of Nursing.
Weighing in at 500 pounds, it can push a hospital bed,
but a patient using it for support can also move it easily,
and it can adapt to a person’s gait.
Mohammad Nasser Saadatzi: So, as soon as somebody
holds onto this -
and tries to push it forward, backward,
or lateral the sensor reads these efforts from the user,
and by following those commands,
it tries to move in the desired direction.
Miles O’Brien: Using other robots back
in the lab,
they’re testing improvements to the hardware and software
that they’ll eventually incorporate
into future versions of ARNA. To start with,
it needs to be able to learn how to get itself around.
In a hospital, objects and people
are constantly on the move.
Dan Popa: For safety reasons,
it’s important that this robot continuously map the environment
and figure out how to get from one place to another.
[rolling]
Miles O’Brien: They also want to optimize
the functionality of the robot arm.
They want nurses to be able to teach a robot what do by
physically demonstrating how it should move.
Dan Popa: Just telling the robot,
“When you help a patient get out of bed,
I need you to be in this position
and hold your hands like this,”
and the person will actually use their strength to stand up,
so you can teach them by demonstration.
The issue is if objects move around in space,
the robot should be able to adapt the motion
to account for that.
[spinning]
Miles O’Brien: A nursing robot will need
to be highly maneuverable, so they’re looking to build in
so-called “Omni-Directional Design,”
the ability to move in any direction equally well.
It hard to imagine ARNA skittering around like this,
but the robot nurse assistants of the future
will be smaller and more agile than this one.
Dan Popa: That’s important to get
around tight spaces, especially in hospitals.
If you have a traditional steering mechanism
where you have to drive back and forth
to be able to move sideways,
that’s not going to work very well.
Miles O’Brien: And then there is deciding
how nurses and patients
could best interface with the assistant.
They’re working on a pressure- sensitive “electronic skin,”
which would cover the entire body of the robot
and respond to touch.
Dan Popa: You can squeeze
a little part of the robot
and it will know that you’re there and you want something.
[robot speaking]
Miles O’Brien: What if the robot
looked like a person, and could talk to you?
This is Phil - modeled on science fiction author Philip K.
Dick.
Popa’s team works with the “Phil” robot on other projects,
and they gave some thought to making ARNA look human.
For now, they decided that is probably more of a turn-off
than an advantage.
Dan Popa: There have been, actually,
discussions about whether we can take the head of Phil
and just plop it onto a naturally looking mobile robot.
You know, that would look very bizarre,
a lot more bizarre than now.
Miles O’Brien: The team will use data gleaned
from the student nurse training sessions
to design follow-on iterations of ARNA.
In time, functionality will improve,
and costs will go down. It’s a win for hospitals,
which are on the lookout to save funds
and reduce patient falls, and it’s a win for nurses too.
Cindi Logsdon: It gives the nurse more time
to be a scientist
and also to be the caring professional
that they want to be
if some of the tasks are taken off their hands.
Miles O’Brien: Looking to the future
designing robot nurse assistants to lend a hand at the hospital.
For Science Nation, I’m Miles O’Brien.