Geek.com Geek News - Flo the robo-nurse Flo the robo-nurse
posted 4:50pm EST Fri Nov 03 2000
NEWS
Robotic nurses could save the U.S. $100 billion dollars in medical and retirement costs caused by incorrectly taken medication. That's just one of the reasons that Professor Sebastian Thrun, director of the Robot Learning Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, and his students created Flo, a five-foot tall robot that should help improve the lives of elderly or infirm people living at home.
Built with $1.4 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, Flo is designed to help health care personnel (doctors, nurses, etc.), not replace them. The primary purpose of the "nurse-bot" is to remind its "patients" when to take their medicine, but it has many other functions as well. Flo can alert others if the patient falls; it has handles so that it can be used as a movement aid; its built-in TV screen and camera enable remote communication with healthcare providers; and it can send and retrieve e-mail and info from the Web. Flo also has voice-recognition software and "the rudiments of a personality." [...]