Penelope the Robo-Nurse

Meet "Penelope", the robo-nurse of the future.

With nurse shortages becoming a problem nationwide, Penelope's creators hope that their creation can help reduce the burden put on nurses.

The robot will not be involved with the actual care of the patients - the most important role of its human counterpart. Instead, its main job will be to help surgeons in the operating room with simple tasks.

Her developers, Michael Treat and his team at Robotic Surgical Tech, Inc., endowed her artificial intelligence specific to surgical situations. Penelope uses voice recognition technology to "listen" for the surgeon's commands. When the surgeon asks for a scalpel, she repeats the word, and using a visual processing capability, reaches for the tool and hands it to the surgeon.

She replaces the tool on her tray once the surgeon is done with it, and even keeps a count of all the instruments to make sure none are accidentally left inside the patient.

Her artificial intelligence allows her to make the same decisions as an experienced scrub nurse - she can anticipate which instrument the surgeon will want next and learns the instrument preferences of various surgeons.

Because Penelope frees up the hands of one scrub nurse, that nurse can instead provide direct care to the patient. Here's a video of Penelope in action during a test run in the operating room of New York-Presbyterian Hospital in May, 2004.

The machine is expected to make its clinical debut this spring at NewYork-Presbyterian/The Allen Pavilion. It will assist a surgeon with a simple excision of a small, benign cyst.

Bjorn Carey

Credit: Nation Science Foundation