The Robotic Circulating Nurse

Mobile service robotics is a promising technology for assisting hospital workflows, thereby relieving clinical staff from cumbersome tasks and battling today’s ongoing problem of severe personnel shortages. To that end, we present the world’s first robotic circulating nurse (RCN), a novel mobile robotic assistance system, which aims to support clinicians during surgical interventions by autonomously executing tasks within nonsterile areas of the operating room (OR) environment. A core use case of the RCN is the collection, opening, and handing over of sterilely packaged surgical materials, for which we describe our approach to robotic design and behavior implementation. Technical evaluation tests show that our RCN prototype reliably handles the end-to-end workflow for providing requested materials to the surgical team. The practical feasibility and user acceptance of the approach were confirmed during a user study conducted with the OR nursing team at a German university hospital. As a main focus of this article, the hygienic robotic handover of surgical materials was evaluated, yielding an overall success rate of 98.71%. While the execution speed is still in need of improvement, our RCN received highly favorable ratings with regard to relevance, usability, reliability, and hygiene. This underlines the high potential of the RCN concept for addressing the staff shortage problem and for upholding today’s high standard of surgical patient care.