Kawasaki and Foxconn build robot nursing assistant to tackle hospital scutwork Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries have revealed a jointly developed robotic nursing assistant they hope to start selling in 2026. The two companies used an existing Kawasaki social robot design called “Nyokkey” as the basis for the new machine, which they called “Nurabot”. Sadly, …
If you've ever been to busy hospital, one thing you don't see is nurses just standing around or strolling along the corridors.
If they're not on the move, it's because they're taking care of a patient or doing admin stuff or preparing doses for patients. They don't have time to loiter.
I don't see those two enormous, bulky things going quickly down the hallways because you don't want them bumping into staff and you certainly don't want them rolling over patients. So they're going to be slow, ponderous, and in the way.
Nurses don't have time to put up with that shit.
I know I'll get downvoted for this, but these robots might be able to supplement some menial work for nurses.
Given one patient is going to cardiac arrest, and another is simply pushing a button for assistance, the human nurse can rush to the urgent patient while a robot meanders to the patient who is simply requesting assistance at will.
Not all hospital work is equal, and if we have the technology to divide needs into urgency, we might be able to give some leeway to the ever-haggard nurses with robotic assistance. Even if the patient actively requesting help would prefer a human over the robot, there are multiple ways to summon a human, from the robot detecting that their presence isn't helpful enough to the human actively requesting it.
Hospital work is some of the most demanding work you can do, even above working at McDonald's. Any amount of automated assistance is definitely required.
Sorry for going against the grain and not saying "damn robots, we need to do everything with menial labor!"
The trick is to teach the robots to do the paperwork. This would save both doctors and nurses tons of precious time, which could then be put into patient care.
And the great thing is, this would allow us to do away with all the pesky actuators. The robot could become a lot smaller, maybe even so small that it could fit on a desk or in a large pocket. Scale up the display a bit, get rid of the silly eyes and output (maybe even input) useful information, and Bob's your uncle (or Auntie, in these modern times).
An even more radical idea would be to reduce, rather than increase the paperwork that politicians and insurance companies require.
Yeah, there are.
One of them is to continuously shout "NUUUUUUUUURRRSSSE" at the top of your damn lungs for twenty minutes straight.
Then a harried nurse comes along and tries to make sense of your bullshit because the only thing you actually want is attention.
You clearly haven't visited hospitals long enough.
Good for you.
Generally my biggest wish is to make them go away, stop poking me with blood tests and blood pressure readings, and let me go to sleep.
But seriously, I've had a couple of short stints in the hospital recently and found at least in my case that the nurses were all responsive and consummate professionals. You'll never find me saying anything to a nurse but "thank you."
Generally my biggest wish is to make them go away, stop poking me with blood tests and blood pressure readings, and let me go to sleep
Last time I was in (hospital - what else did you think I meant?) I was heartily glad that I use the Freestyle Libre glucose measuring patches otherwise they would have been doing finger prick tests every 3 hours..
(And the time before that they seemed to forget I was diabetic - on the day of the op (nil by mouth and all that) they didn't once come to see what my blood sugar was. Took me going down to the nurses station to ask for some glucose as I was heading straight to a hypo. The surgeon was *not* amused - he arrived as I was about to take the glucose tablet..They also had forgotten to do the mobility assessment and so put in one of the patient mobility mats in the bed [1] and refused to turn it off. So I did, took it out and dumped it on the chair - thus proving that I *was* mobile..)
The staff are great, the hospital system much less so.
[1] Mat with multiple inflatable compartments designed to reduce bed sores. Has a very loud and distracting air pump - I find it hard to sleep in hospital to start with and having that kicking in at random intervals didn't help.
"Not all hospital work is equal, ..."
And if we can prevent nurses from a lifetime of back pain caused by lifting and moving patients weighing in at five times their mass that can only be a good thing.
Even if the robots do nothing more than lift stuff, it is still a worthy innovation.
If they can also deploy A.E.D.'s and other tools either on command or semi-autonomusly, so much the better. Trying to keep a flat-liner alive while screaming for human help can only ever be a good thing.
It was once commonplace for human patients to request that some types of human be excluded from caring for them. That sort of prejudice has mostly vanished, which is a good, lovely and beautiful thing. Any prejudice against robotic assistance will eventually disappear after the patients gain greater understanding of the powers and the limitations of their robotic helpers. No robot could ever, *ever* totaly replace human medics of any rank or speciality but they could be useful tools. Just as stethoscopes, thermometers and those little watches are. Even relatively dim patients could, over time and interactions, learn to see this.
Even without "The Three Laws", robots are never going to go rampaging through the halls annihilating anything that breathes. They simply won't have the programming nor the carrying capacity to manage such a task. Unless, of course, they are running on Windows.
But, of course, no one would *ever* run mission-critical stuff on Windows.
if you visit Addenbrookes, Cambridge you will see the robotic cleaners that go around the corridors and has been doing for some time
I've seen the same at St George's in Tooting, quite spooky late at night when there's nobody around but you and the robotic cleaner.
But let's be honest, there's a VAST gap between the variety of nursing care tasks, and a big motorised tin can bumbling slowly around the corridors, with no more advanced technology than a few ultrasonic proximity detectors, a mopping pattern and a return-to-base memory. For family reasons I've seen a lot more of the inside of hospitals lately than I'd like, and at no point have I seen nursing staff doing simple, repetitive actions that lend themselves to automation in a healthcare setting. Getting a robot to make up a bed would be trivially easy using a miniaturised and mobile setup of the sort of technology used in manufacturing. But that happens in protected cages with lots of room, near-millimetre precision of the source parts to be picked up and handled. How would that work in a busy healthcare setting, with a patient in the bed, and air, fluid, catheter and monitor lines all over the place?
Let's say you have a robot programmed to do the drugs round, that's quite functional, and easily described? Put the dispensing robot on the same sort of base as the robot cleaner, job done! Yet needs to know exact locations where the beds are, to be updated for bed moves, medication changes, to do away with meatsacks it needs to check the patient has taken the meds, maybe assist the patient take the meds, collect feedback "this painkiller isn't doing much, can I have something stronger", "I'm allergic to that", "aaagghhhh, mmchokinmmmmmm, hmp, hmp, galllnusss!". And it needs to keep records of what was administered, needs to recharge itself, get out of the way in an emergency, ensure that passers by can't steal controlled drugs, and a whole load of things I've overlooked.
I'm not seeing any useful automation of nursing care any time soon. Some diagnosis and operations on the other hand I could see (indeed a few are) using automation and AI.
Too late for anyone to read this, but my first thought on reading that was, if you could make the gathering & dissemination of all that patient data instant & reliable, as you'd need to if you wanted to outsource those jobs to a robot as you say, then likely you'd already see some significant benefits in the form of reduced errors & increased efficiency, even if you never actually bothered implementing the robot bit?
Installing a tube system into a set of hospital buildings that are constantly changing, being rebuilt, and are a combination of legacy 70's concrete and portacabins is hard - very hard. And those systems are expensive too, to keep running. Then once you've built one, two years down the line they move the relevant department into a different building and it's all completely redundant.
Robots - or people - are necessary to provide flexibility.
What they need is a robot that can get the patient to the restroom before they soil themselves. The understaffing at many hospitals is chronic and deliberate because of corporate greed. Robots that deliver medicine, mop floors and even provide remote doctor interaction have been around for years. I suggest that the day is coming when hospitals will use AI nurses and doctors to treat you because it will make even more money for the investors.
They're at least seven years behind the UK in this! And if there's anything we've learned since, it's that beyond just plain deceiving humans, robots in such occupations also have a tendecy to either outright flee the drudgery, or straight up end it all, in despair ... a total waste of resources!
Naaaah. What's all the rage and truly working beautifully in elderly care at present are not a bunch of cold mechanical RotM killer devices out to get us, but large, friendly, warm-blooded horses. And yes, even miniature ones are great, and yes, even in Singapore. Plus, they make delicious beef lasagne when you're done with 'em ... bonus!
When a killer robot is the last thing on earth to "care" for us, we know we're screwed, imho!
I was in a waiting area of a hospital in Thailand, and a robotic floor waxing robot came to a screeching stop a few centimeters from where I was standing. The robot apologized to me both in Thai and English, did a 180 and whirred away. I thought this was hilarious. The Thai patient next to me didn't. Well, to quote Jay May, "humor doesn't translate".
"transporting blood samples or medicines through a hospital, or guiding patients around a hospital. It can also apparently educate patients about hygiene"
so basically useless. Transport to the lab is already covered by very fast pneumatic systems, and the pharmacy carts are already automated. Patients resent being instructed about hygiene, and the ones who need it won't listen. The only use case that makes sense here is guiding patients/visitors, since no one is capable of reading signs.
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