A new approach could allow artificial nurses to help patients dress.
Matthew Sparkes is a writer.
The robot is handling the gown.
The article is titled "Zhang et al. (2022)."
A two-armed robot can dress a medical mannequin in a hospital gown. The technology isn't yet ready for use on people, but it is an experimental step towards artificial nurses in hospitals.
The Certified Nursing Assistant test used in US healthcare is similar to the one Fan and Yiannis tested their robot in, in which a nurse has to put an open-backed robe on a person with weak or paralyzed arms. They used a mannequin instead of a human.
Flexible objects like a gown are difficult to work with because of their shape and size, which can vary dramatically depending on how they are draped. Instead of trying to track the entire gown, the robot focuses on key points that it needs to grasp and manipulate.
The pair partially trained the robot's artificial intelligence control system using a computer simulation. The robot dressed the patient 90.5 per cent of the time.
Mehmet Dogar says that it looks like a good approach to identify key spots on the gown and ignore the other points.
He says that when you put your own shirt on, you don't know where the rest of the garment is.
Dogar says that robot nurses are still some way off. I don't think we can say robotic nurses are near, but we need to ask and investigate questions so that we can move towards that.
Science Robotics is a journal.
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