Subscribe to Nurseweek | Nursing Spectrum ADVERTISEMENT advertisement Print This Select Text Size: Comments With technology on the way to developing robots that can perform certain nursing tasks,
Office 2010 Professional Plus, one question is how patients would react to being touched by such gadgets .Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who presented their work this week at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Switzerland, said people generally did not mind a robots touch. But their perception of the reason behind the touch made a big difference.For the study, the researchers had a robot named Cody touch and wipe a persons forearm. Although Cody touched the subjects in exactly the same way, they reacted more positively when they believed Cody intended to clean their arm versus when they believed Cody intended to comfort them.These results echo similar studies involving nurses.There have been studies of nurses and theyve looked at how people respond to physical contact with nurses, said Charlie Kemp,
Office 2010 License, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.And they found that, in general, if people interpreted the touch of the nurse as being instrumental, as being important to the task, then people were OK with it. But if people interpreted the touch as being to provide comfort people were not so comfortable with that.Perhaps surprisingly, people preferred not to receive a warning from the robot that it was about to touch them.We think this might be because they were startled when the robot started speaking, but the results are generally inconclusive,
Office Standard 2007, said Tiffany Chen, a Georgia Tech doctoral student.Many important healthcare tasks, such as wound dressing and assisting with hygiene,
Windows 7 Pro, would require a robotic nurse to touch the patients body,If we want robots to be successful in healthcare,
Office Pro Plus, were going to need to think about how do we make those robots communicate their intention and how do people interpret the intentions of the robot, Kemp said. "And I think people havent been as focused on that until now. Primarily people have been focused on how can we make the robot safe, how can we make it do its task effectively. But thats not going to be enough if we actually want these robots out there helping people in the real world. To comment, e-mail editorNTL@gannetthg.com or post a comment below.