FW-HTF-P: Safeguarding the Health of Healthcare Workers During Future Pandemics, Using Robotics and Automation

The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the healthcare system to the breaking point and has transformed healthcare delivery, forcing a strong shift to telemedicine. This reduction in-person healthcare visits is a key strategy for healthcare surge control now and in the future. However, current tele-systems provide mostly communication support, while the physical interactions required for diagnostic procedures, interventional procedures, and bedside care still largely rely on in-person care. Innovative approaches in automation and robotics have the potential to assist and protect healthcare workers in many of these areas of patient care. The current work develops novel compliant actuators to enable safe physical interactions with patients, thus minimizing the need for physical contact with healthcare providers. The investigators will design robotic systems with varying degrees of autonomy, using a vascular access delivery system as a testbed. The technology developed in this project can be used to mitigate the impact of the next pandemic and spearhead change in healthcare for the future. This project serves healthcare workers in clinical settings who care for patients with infectious and other diseases by investigating robotics, autonomous systems, trust of physical human-robot interaction and the impacts on safety, productivity, and economics. The proposed research and experiments on compliant robotics should yield new techniques for medical robots that are safe for physical interaction with humans, while maintaining low cost for mass production. The proposed control-design activities address shortfalls in current autonomous robot controllers by providing new strategies to maximize safety, trust, and performance. Finally, this work brings stakeholders from nursing, medicine, economics, and psychology together with experts in medical robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomy, and disease transmission to provide a roadmap for a sustainable future of healthcare in which increased use of robots and autonomous systems is part of the solution. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.