Your Future Nurse Could Be a Robot

Nursing is an art and as well as caring and the way we receive this health care could be change sooner. Could you imagine your nursing assistant on your next visit to a hospital is a robot? Yes, a robot! This may not far as we can imagine with the latest research implications recently published on Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Artificial Intelligence).

A study have been conducted by international team as led by Dr. Elena De Momi, of the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) that shows humans and robots can effectively coordinate their actions during high-stakes events such as surgeries. The team trained a robot to imitate natural human actions by performing human-like and the non-human-like trajectories in a random order.

Dr. De Momi's team captures photos of a human nursing assistant performing numerous reaching motions in a way similar to handing instruments and supplies to a surgeon and these images were inputted into the neural network of the robotic arm, which is crucial to controlling movements. After that, a human operator guided the robotic arm in imitating the reaching motions of the human subject.

Several humans made their observations as the robotic arm performed numerous motions and they determined that about 70% of the time of the robot's neural networks had effectively learned to imitate human behavior and biologically inspired.

These results leads Dr. De Momi's conclusions that "If robotic arms can indeed imitate human behavior, it would be necessary to build conditions in which humans and robots can cooperate effectively in high stress environments like operating rooms".

Nurses play a major role in healthcare provisions. Would this study conclusions lead to removal of nurses in the operating room?

The goal of this study is not to remove human expertise from the operating room, but to complement it with a robot's particular skills and benefits.

Dr. De Momi explains, "As a roboticist, I am convinced that robotic coworkers and collaborators will definitely change the work market, but they won't steal job opportunities. They will just allow us to decrease workload and achieve better performances in several tasks, from medicine to industrial applications."

This study is a proof of the growing field of healthcare robotics.

Healthcare's future is so vast that its enormous potential to cause a massive change the way we receive treatments and health care sooner rather than later with the study of Dr. De Momi Team.