Full article on Fast Company
A hospital introduced a robot to help nurses. They didn’t expect it to be so popular
Moxi is a robot designed to make nurses’ lives easier. But the friendly bot is turning out to be a welcome presence for some patients, too.
Nurses are in high demand: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of jobs for nurses will grow 15% from 2016 to 2026, which is much faster than other jobs. The current shortage has left hospitals in a crunch—and a few hospitals in Texas recently turned to an unusual solution: a robot named Moxi.
But Moxi, which was designed and built by the Austin-based company Diligent Robotics, isn’t trying to act like a nurse. Instead, Diligent Robotics founders Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu have designed their robot to run the approximately 30% of tasks nurses do that don’t involve interacting with patients, like running errands around the floor or dropping off specimens for analysis at a lab.
