Countries with aging populations are increasingly turning to robots amid worsening healthcare worker shortages.
As governments and investors pump money into AI-powered robots, they’re becoming smarter with better navigation, communication, and data-sharing capabilities. While they can be expensive upfront, they can also help reduce costs, working around-the-clock without breaks or overtime pay.
SDU’s HospiBot
With funding from an EU program focused on cross-border healthcare automation, SDU Robotics is developing modular service robots to assume non-medical hospital roles.
SDU is based at the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, which is part of the University of Southern Denmark. The institute is known for cutting-edge research into automation and artificial intelligence.
They’re leading the Hospibot project with €1.6 million from the European Union’s Interreg Deutchland-Danmark program. Launched in September 2023, the HospiBot project is set to run until August 2026. It’s coordinated by the university in partnership with hospitals in Denmark and Germany.
The project aims to address healthcare staff shortages by automating routine tasks like greeting and guiding patients and visitors, small-scale logistics, light cleaning and disinfection of surfaces, assisting with parking registration, and locating lost items.
The HospiBot project focuses on social interaction to reduce patient anxiety, especially for children. HospiBot’s humanoid module, HuGo, has been deployed at the children’s ward at Odense University Hospital, where it actively engages with patients through friendly gestures such as waving and pointing toward information kiosks.
The humanoid’s modular mobile base can attach payloads for different tasks.
The SDU team is addressing challenges with social robots in hospital settings. The biggest hurdles include translating the needs of healthcare professionals into technical specifications for engineering and ensuring the robot is compact enough to navigate narrow corridors.
The HospiBot team is refining the robot’s interaction modules to make communication with patients more intuitive. They’re also drafting standardized guidelines for the use of hospital robots across different healthcare systems.
Enchanted Tools
In France, Enchanted Tools is developing new-age service robots to take on social logistics and repetitive tasks in healthcare settings.
Jérôme Monceaux, who helped create the social robots Pepper and Nao, founded the startup that says it’s ushering in the post-robot era. Its flagship humanoid robot, Mirokaï, is also intended for retail, hospitality, and events.
Mirokaï is now being trained at Accenture. The global tech consulting giant’s robotics team is exploring how to integrate the AI robot into computer systems across industries.
Mirokaï moves using a special rolling globe system. Standing 1.3 meters, the robot weighs around 30 kg (66 lbs). Its arms have 28 degrees of freedom (DoF). Its battery stays charged for about 8 hours.
The robots come with a backstory that’s quite elaborate. The Mirokaï are a species from space dating back to ancient times created to help humans think more about understanding others.
They inspire through their creativity. They’re extremely tech savvy, wise, and kind, guiding humans to connect better with others and grow as people. The company worked with French film studio Gaumont to bring the story to life with animation.
Devanthro’s Robody
Germany, with one of the world’s oldest populations, faces significant challenges in supporting its seniors while maintaining their independence and dignity.
Enter Robody, a German humanoid robot designed to revolutionize the homecare. Garching-based Devanthro says the robot has been tested in real homes, proving it can operate in unmodified conditions.
Controlled by teleoperation, the robot can help with tasks like cooking, giving medications, finding lost items, and socializing. With haptic feedback and advanced VR controls, someone anywhere in the world can provide physical assistance, making it much easier for aging individuals to stay comfortably at home.
The Robody has soft skin for safe home use and can be customized to match a household’s style.
Moxi by Diligent Robotics
In the US, Texas-based Diligent Robotics develops autonomous robots to assist healthcare workers by handling routine, non-clinical tasks.
Robotics experts Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu launched the Austin startup in 2017.
Its flagship robot, Moxi, navigates hospital corridors autonomously. The humanoid mobile service robot moves with a wheeled base, independently avoiding obstacles and using elevators. Its robotic arm can grasp, pull open, and guide objects to perform logistical tasks without human intervention.
Diligent Robotics says Moxi’s social intelligence is designed to interact seamlessly with human healthcare workers.
As of November 2024, Moxi robots have completed more than 110,000 autonomous elevator rides across healthcare systems in the US. The robots complete over 20,000 fully autonomous elevator rides each month, which the startup says shows their consistent use in hospital operations.
Moxi service robots have been deployed in hospitals since 2018, delivering supplies to patients’ rooms, transporting lab samples, and fetching items for nursing units. Adoption surged during the COVID-19 pandemic and, by the end of 2023, 100 Moxi robots were in over 30 hospitals.
Moxi’s creators tout the technology’s plug-and-play design that allows for quick deployments. The robots come with preloaded software and configurations for key hospital tasks.
Moxi uses Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to rapidly map hospital layouts without extensive manual programming. The navigation system adapts to real-time changes in its surroundings.
Trained teams assist hospitals during initial deployments, but Diligent says Moxi’s interface is user-friendly enough that staffers can manage it without technical expertise.
Panasonic’s Hospi Robots
In Japan, Panasonic produces autonomous robots for delivering medications, lab samples, and medical supplies in hospitals.
Introduced in 2013, the Hospi robots use advanced sensors to navigate corridors and avoid obstacles independently. A locked compartment ensures secure transport of supplies.
Panasonic says the robot minimizes the need for direct contact with sick patients, which is useful for infection control.
Cloud Ginger
In China, AI-powered robots like the Cloud Ginger provide interactive support and perform tasks in healthcare, retail, security, and hospitality settings.
The robot, developed by Beijing-based CloudMind Technology, has a humanoid appearance with arms for gesturing and assisting. Ginger’s AI gets real-time updates from the cloud. The robot speaks multiple languages and features an interactive display on its chest for guiding users.
Robots like Ginger are a priority in China, where the government is determined to rule the emerging humanoid robotics market by 2027.
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