Kudos to Ryan Shaw and Kris Hauser – Pratt School of Engineering, co-principal investigators, and their entire team for the submission of their NIH R21 application entitled "Toward Telerobotic Nursing." This proposal requests funding for a two-year period with a start date of September 1, 2017.

Abstract: During disease outbreaks, such as the Ebola epidemic of 2014–2015, and with highly infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, there is a high risk of patients spreading disease to other patients and healthcare personnel. Healthcare workers are at particularly high risk for infection due to routine interaction with patients, handling of contaminated materials, and challenges associated with safely removing protective gear. Moreover, if healthcare workers become infected they not only leave a gap in care delivery, but also they risk transmitting highly infection diseases to other patients and co-workers within and outside care delivery settings.

Thus, new tools are needed for reducing the exposure of healthcare workers to pathogens that may be carried by infectious patients that not only reduce the likelihood of pathogen transmission but allow for adequate care delivery. Robotics is a promising approach to address these challenges. Robots could perform care delivery duties inside high-risk clinical areas, which could reduce infection transmission by minimizing exposure to pathogens and other biohazards.

Via NSF seed funding, our team developed a first-generation prototype of such a system, named the Tele-Robotic Intelligent Nursing Assistant (TRINA), and tested it successfully in a hospital simulation lab. From a safe location, a human nurse can log on to TRINA to communicate with patients and other workers via audio/video communication, navigate around obstacles, bring food and medicine, operate equipment, and move carts and furniture. This proposal aims to build off these preliminary results to raise its technological readiness to the stage of in-situ clinical testing. We propose to conduct a 2-year study to develop TRINA to have clinical functionality including the ability to: 1) perform a remote physical assessment and collect vital signs; 2) collect sterile blood, sputum, saliva, and urine sample with short-term storage and transport capabilities; and 3) develop clinical workflow integration procedures. We will test the feasibility of TRINA’s capabilities in a simulated hospital first on manikins and then in a clinical research unit with healthy volunteers.