Healthcare environments are facing increasing pressure from aging populations, growing service demands, and shortages of healthcare workers and caregivers. In hospitals, surgical facilities, rehabilitation centers, elderly care facilities, and patient rooms, many service tasks are simple but frequent, including item delivery, object fetching, bedside interaction, and assistance with objects located in low or confined spaces. These tasks are often physically repetitive and time-consuming; however, they are essential for efficient care delivery and patient independence.
This project focuses on embodied healthcare service robotics for hospital and patient assistance. We aim to develop intelligent robotic systems that can safely operate in real healthcare environments, understand human needs, and physically assist healthcare workers, caregivers, and patients. The project includes two complementary directions. The first direction investigates how existing robotic platforms, such as wheeled humanoid robots and mobile manipulators, can be adapted for hospital and surgical-facility service tasks, including item delivery, workflow support, and human-centered assistance. The second direction develops dedicated low-cost assistive robots for patient-centered care, with an emphasis on compact structure, object retrieval, bedside and chairside handover, and practical deployment in patient and elderly care environments.
Embodied Healthcare Service Robotics for Hospital and Patient Assistance
Researchers
Introduction
The Main Impact
Embodied intelligence and digital twin for healthcare service environments
• Develop task-oriented perception, scene understanding, and human instruction interpretation for hospitals, surgical facilities, rehabilitation centers, elderly care facilities, and patient-side environments.
• Build simulators and digital twins of healthcare service environments to support task design, workflow modeling, robot training, and safe validation before real-world deployment.
• Support workflow-aware navigation and interaction so that robots can operate safely around patients, caregivers, healthcare workers, furniture, and medical facilities.
Hospital service robots based on existing robotic platforms
• Explore the use of wheeled humanoid robots and mobile manipulation platforms for hospital and surgical-facility service tasks.
• Develop robotic capabilities for item delivery, equipment transportation, room-level assistance, routine workflow support, and human-centered interaction with healthcare workers.
• Translate general-purpose robotic platforms into healthcare-specific service robots by adapting their perception, navigation, manipulation, and interaction functions to real healthcare environments.
Customized low-cost robots for patient-centered assistance
• Develop compact and affordable assistive robots for patient rooms, rehabilitation centers, elderly care facilities, and home-like care spaces.
• Target high-frequency daily assistance tasks, including object fetching, bedside/chairside handover, object retrieval, and support for patients with limited mobility.
• Integrate large-model-based interaction, including language and vision-language interfaces, to allow patients and caregivers to communicate needs naturally and receive adaptive robotic assistance.
