When a patient arrives in the ER, the first thing he or she must do is register. Today, this is handled by a registration clerk. In the proposed system, the clerk would direct the patient (or attending family members) to a robot assistant in the form of a kiosk. The robot assistant would guide them through the registration process using a touch-screen and possibly voice prompts. When proper security measures are in place, the robot will be able to fill in much of the information for existing patients by accessing their electronic records. When the patients provide critical information, such as reporting chest pain, the robot can immediately alert the staff so they can provide immediate attention. Lacking such an alert, the robot would inform the patient of the current wait time and direct him or her to the waiting room.
The emergency room application is a perfect way to test a special cognitive architecture that the Vanderbilt engineers have developed for robots that is based on the working memory in the brain. "Our architecture is designed to allow robots to integrate quick decision-making with the more common deliberate decision-making process in flexible ways," Kawamura said.
The paper proposes a system of cognitive robots that gather medical information and take basic diagnostic measurements and ultimately provide tentative diagnoses to the human staff in order to address the critical concerns facing emergency departments in major hospitals: shortening the time that patients must wait, relieving the strain on overburdened emergency room staff and reducing the number of mistakes that are made.
