'A little bit sci-fi': How robots can make a dent in nurses' workloads

Diligent Robotics CEO and cofounder Andrea Thomaz explains how her company's clinical support robot Moxi works and how its design informs its interactions with humans.

Diligent Robotics, which earlier this week announced a $30 million Series B funding round, aims to lessen some of that staffing burden by automating routine delivery tasks with its Moxi robot. The company's CEO and cofounder, Andrea Thomaz, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss how Moxi works, what it takes to onboard a robot hospital worker and how Moxi's design informs its interactions with humans. MobiHealthNews: Can you tell me a bit about how Moxi works and how it assists healthcare providers in hospitals? Andrea Thomaz: Moxi is what's called in robotics a mobile manipulation robot. That just means it's got a mobile base, an arm that can manipulate things in the environment and a socially expressive head that lets people know what Moxi is doing. MHN: Why did you decide to focus on implementing robotics in healthcare, particularly for that fetch-and-delivery space? But our expertise is in human-robot interaction, and in particular, thinking about robots interacting with a team of people. That's really the exciting part to us as roboticists, it's finding that collaboration between a robot and a team of people. We learned that we didn't need to have special software for lab deliveries and another piece of software for pharmacy, we actually wanted it to be more generic than that, so that we can really just think about the whole hospital as any waypoints that people wanted to set. I think, from the end user's [perspective], like the people that are actually using Moxi for deliveries, they see right away the value.