Title:
Advancing Robotic Nursing Assistance Through Human-Robot Collaboration
Spekers:
Jane Li
Abstract Over the last decade, robots for nursing assistance have evolved from mobile telepresence to mobile manipulators and humanoid robots. Compared to tele-robotic systems developed for specific and structured intervention (e.g., tele-surgery), nursing robots are expected to be more general-purpose and to perform a wide range of tasks including communication, mobility, measurement of clinical data, general manipulation and tool use, and will need more assistance from humans to operate in dynamic, cluttered, human environments, in hospitals, nursing facilities and homes. Recently, many mobile manipulators and humanoid robots deployed all over the world have proven their value for pandemic patient care, for mitigating the shortage of caregivers and reducing their infection risks. Beyond pandemic responses, our aging society, which is getting 8-hours older every day on average and facing a shortage of nursing workforce, may increasingly depend on robots to provide more sustainable, affordable, and accessible care, because the nursing robots can effectively enable the nurses to professional task engagement and reduce nurses’ turnover intention and time pressure.
This talk will introduce our extensive work that advances robotic nursing assistance through the development of intelligent human-robot interfaces. These interfaces not enable novice operators to achieve efficient, intuitive and effortless control of complex nursing robot systems, but also provide an effective training approach so that they can quickly adapt to robot operation. Besides the intelligent human-robot interfaces talk, we also developed open-source physical testbed (IONA) and virtual nursing robot testbed (NurSim) to support the community interested in nursing robotics research and education.
Bio Sketch Prof. Jane Li has been an assistant professor with the Robotics Engineering Department of Worcester Polytechnic Institute since 2017. She received her Master degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2009 from University of Victoria in Canada, and Ph.D in Computer Engineering in 2014 from University of California, Santa Cruz. She was a postdoctoral associate with Duke University in 2015-2016. She has extensive experience in human-robot interaction and interfaces for various medical robots for stroke rehabilitation, tele-surgery and tele-nursing assistance. At WPI, her research focuses on developing intelligent human-robot interfaces that enable efficient, intuitive and effortless control of complex nursing robotic systems (e.g., mobile manipulator and humanoid robots) for nursing assistance in pandemic patient care. To this end, she also conducted extensive experimental studies to investigate human vision-motion coordination when using cameras for active perception, in order to inform the design of robot autonomy to assist human operator’s remote perception and robot operation. Her research has been funded by NSF, NIOSH, DEVCOM, and SEMI-FlexTech.