Amid the unpredictability and occasional chaos of emergency rooms, a robot has the potential to assist health care workers and support clinical teamwork, Cornell and Michigan State University researchers found.

The research team’s robotic crash cart prototype highlights the potential for robots to assist health care workers in bedside patient care and offers designers a framework to develop and test robots in other unconventional areas.

“When you're trying to integrate a robot into a new environment, especially a high stakes, time-sensitive environment, you can't go straight to a fully autonomous system,” said Angelique Taylor, assistant professor in information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. “We first need to understand how a robot can help. What are the mechanisms in which the robot embodiment can be useful?”

Taylor is the lead author of “Towards Collaborative Crash Cart Robots that Support Clinical Teamwork,” which received a best paper honorable mention in the design category at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in March.

The paper builds on Taylor’s ongoing research exploring robotics and team dynamics in unpredictable health care settings, like emergency and operating rooms.

Read the full story on the Cornell Bowers CIS website.