A Nurse’s Best Friend: Army Seeks Robot Helper
A career in nursing may involve quite a lot of physical labor under normal circumstances, but a career as a nurse at a military medical facility can prove even more laborious. Nurses must tend to patients who often far outweigh them, moving combat-wounded bed-ridden warfighters who may have special needs when necessary while conscientiously treating their injuries.
Ronald Marchessault, portfolio manager for advanced medical imaging at the Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), identified the intense physical labor of being a nurse as to why some nurses might leave an already under-staffed profession. But Marchessault had an idea of what to do about it. The Army, he mused, should help to create a robotic nursing assistant capable of gently lifting patients and performing other strenuous tasks that prove daunting to nurses dedicated to their patients’ care.
And so TATRC, based at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., issued a solicitation under the small business innovative research (SBIR) program to create the first-ever “Advanced Medical Robotic System Augmenting Healthcare Capabilities.” TATRC received submissions under the proposal from April 12 to June 13.
“By design, under the SBIR program, a prototype would be developed,” Marchessault told Military Medical Technology. “This might be a very early prototype. At the end, commercial viability is mandatory for this program. Ideally at the end, there would be some commercial interest to make a product.
“I would like to think that maybe in three years we would have that prototype,” he continued. “This would be a betalevel prototype. This would not be ready for commercial production, but hopefully without too many additional requirements could achieve commercial viability in the near future. When I say near future, I mean three to eight years.”
The final product would be a robotic assistant that could take direction from a nurse and could aid in a patient’s recovery. In his SBIR solicitation, Marchessault also cited a recent report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies that found the working conditions of nurses are a major contributor to medical errors. A robotic nursing assistant would relieve some of the stress of high patient-to-nurse ratios, exhausting long shifts, inexperienced staff and tight time constraints.
“A robotic nurse’s assistant could perform the brute-force heavy lifting of moving patients and such,” Marchessault explained. “That could help with the longevity of a nurse’s career. It also could provide a robotic assistant to possibly help patients who are still bedridden but becoming more ambulatory. A robotic device could be the platform that acts as a crutch to help in their ambulation.”
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
Parts of such a robotic nursing assistant exist on the market today, Marchessault observed, but nothing as complete as envisioned by the SBIR proposal.
“Today’s advances in robotic technology can provide human care givers with help in the labor intense hospital or clinical work place, augmenting human physical capabilities and performing some regular, repetitive tasks,” the SBIR solicitation noted.
But the end product Marchessault envisions would require enhanced flexibility, dexterity, sensors and human interaction capabilities. The SBIR proposal submitted that such a robot also must be slender and powerful to move heavy loads within the confines of tight spaces. A slender torso in relation to the base is important for such a robot because it must operate by patients’ beds, which are often in close quarters.
“We are trying to move patients; we are trying to move people. This robotic system will have to be able to lift—I set a minimum threshold of—300 pounds. It will have to lift a 300-pound patient,” Marchessault declared. “That’s not an easy task if you consider how humans maneuver themselves throughout the body. The robot will have to do that too. It’s not all arm strength. It’s also torso strength. You need a base that allows you to lift that sort of weight.
“It will have to possess arms and flexible end effectors to be maneuvered by a nurse,” he added. “It’s a robotic system that has to work in conjunction with humans. It’s not autonomous in the sense that it is going to do everything on its own. It’s going to take commands from a nurse. The end effectors will have to be flexible enough to be maneuvered around certain things but also capable of moving heavy loads.”
Safety is important in the operation of the robot, the SBIR proposal stressed, including basics such as avoiding obstacles and complexities such as handling injured warfighters. The robot also should possess communications and command-andcontrol capabilities that involve wireless networking and remote control. While tele-operation is an important characteristic of the final robot, the assistant also should be capable of automatic start-up and self-diagnosis to enable operations with personnel who have a range of skills and experience.
POTENTIAL SUBSYSTEMS
So while some companies offer commercial robots that potentially make up parts of the final robotic nursing assistant, no company has the complete system sought by Marchessault. The SBIR proposal includes a few references to products offered by other companies to date. Chief among those companies is iRobot Inc. of Burlington, Mass., which produces several robots used by U.S. military forces.
A spokeswoman for iRobot declined to comment for this article, but the SBIR solicitation makes a specific reference to the company’s iRobot PackBot 510 with Explosive Ordnance Disposal Kit. The Pack- Bot 510 is a tough remote-controlled robot capable of moving 46 pounds with a 360- degree swivel base.
The solicitation also references government- sponsored work such as the NASA Robonaut. The Robonaut is a joint project with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create a humanoid robot capable of acting like an astronaut on some space missions. NASA and DARPA are working to make the Robonaut capable of doing tasks not traditionally associated with robots. The Robonaut also would utilize a telepresense control system to permit continual control by a human being.
Indeed, DARPA and TATRC have cooperated in the past on battlefield robotic systems to treat or move injured warfighters. Marchessault acknowledged synergies between such efforts and the robotic nursing assistant.
“There are subsystems that you can take from what already exists on the shelf,” he commented. “I think the end game on this is very different from what is out there right now. The Japanese have moved into this area quite extensively with their robots. But to be facile enough with a graceful profile to move around very tight spaces in a hospital ward in close quarters with humans and also be able to maneuver 300 pounds deftly and safely is a big challenge. So it’s very different from what is out there right now. Still, some of the applications that exist can be considered part of a greater system.
“I’m sure the potential investigators that are proposing their research to us will take that into consideration,” he added.
Indeed, phase one of the Advanced Medical Robotic System SBIR instructs the successful contractor to “conduct research and gather data focused on previous and current work in robotic system development.” The company would then generate a report describing the concept of the final robot while identifying existing applications that it could incorporate into the final product.
In the second phase of the SBIR, the contractor would design, develop and demonstrate a prototype of the nursing assistant robot that fulfills all of the requirements of the SBIR. Finally, phase three would lead to a new medical mobile nurses’ assistant robot system.
“I think this is a very exciting research proposal,” Marchessault concluded. “I think it has widespread application not just to hospitals but also to other care facilities and other industries. For anything that requires physical labor to lift and move heavy objects, I think in the future we are going to see robotic systems doing more and more of that. They are already using robotics in a crude way to move stuff, but I think we will see robotics that can do so with more precision.” ♦