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.

“We’re helping them augment their staff,” says Thomaz, who formerly was a robotics professor at UT Austin and Georgia Tech, where she ran the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab. “It’s hard to argue that we’re taking anyone’s job. Everyone is trying to make the nurses they have go further.”

Moxi is equipped with a robotic arm and a set of wheels on its base, and can be preprogrammed to run errands around the hospital. It works like this: Moxi is hooked into the hospital’s electronic health record system. Nurses can set up rules and tasks so that the robot gets a command for an errand when certain things change in a patient’s record on Moxi’s floor. For instance, if a patient has been discharged and their room is marked clean in the health record, Moxi will get a command to take an admission bucket—a set of fresh supplies for a new patient—to the room so that it’s all ready to go for the next person.

That means nurses don’t even have to remember certain tasks that used to be part of their daily job, which is a meaningful way to reduce their cognitive load. “They don’t have to think about telling the robot to do things,” says Chu, who has a PhD in robotics from Georgia Tech, where she worked in Thomaz’s lab.



Thomaz points to one nurse in Dallas who told the team that she never saw Moxi put admission buckets in clean rooms, but that the buckets were just always where they were supposed to be. The nurse told the Diligent team that she just didn’t have to think about the task anymore—which means that she could spend more time with patients. Learning what kinds of tasks would reduce nurses’ cognitive load took a lot of time: Before the team even started to build Moxi, they shadowed nurses and physicians for 150 hours to understand what they would need. Then, once the robot was built, the team’s engineers accompanied the robot everywhere during further tests at the hospital. Finally, the team was able to fine-tune Moxi’s interactions with nurses during beta trials at several hospitals in Texas during late 2018 and early 2019.