"Days after Meagan Brazil-Sheehan's 6-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia, they were walking down the halls of UMass Memorial Children's Medical Center when they ran into Robin the Robot. "Luca, how are you?" it asked in a high-pitched voice programmed to sound like a 7-year-old girl. "It's been awhile." Brazil-Sheehan said they had only met the 4-foot-tall (1.2-meter-tall) robot with a large screen displaying cartoonlike features once before after they were admitted several days earlier."
""Nurses and medical staff are really overworked, under a lot of pressure, and unfortunately, a lot of times they don't have capacity to provide engagement and connection to patients," said Karen Khachikyan, CEO of Expper Technologies, which developed the robot. "Robin helps to alleviate that part from them." As AI increasingly becomes a part of daily life, it's found a foothold in medical care - providing everything from note-taking during exams to electronic nurses."
Robin is an AI-powered therapeutic robot designed to act like a little girl, standing about four feet tall with a large screen that displays cartoonlike features. The robot converses in a childlike voice to provide emotional support to patients, often eliciting joyful responses from children. Deployment focuses on nursing homes and pediatric hospital units to help address staffing shortages and gaps in patient engagement. The system operates at roughly 30% autonomy with remote operators controlling the remainder under clinical supervision. Interaction data is collected under HIPAA compliance to improve capabilities over time. Adoption has expanded to about 30 U.S. health care facilities, prompting both praise for efficiency and concern about effects on patient care.
Read at Fortune
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