WATCH: Robot Nurses Have Made Their Way to San Angelo

SAN ANGELO, TX – Shannon Medical Center announced Wednesday the launch of Moxi, a care team delivery robot in its nursing units. In partnership with Diligent Robotics, nurses and other care team members can now call on a pair of robots named Moxi to help them with their everyday tasks improving overall clinical flows and giving nurses back valuable time to maximize care for their patients.

“At Shannon, our people are our most important resource in delivering care to our patients. As the entire nation is experiencing a shortage in nursing professionals, we have explored additional ways to support our care teams on the units,” said Pam Bradshaw, DNP, RN, FAONL, MBA, NEA-BC, Chief Operations Officer and Chief Nursing Officer at Shannon Medical Center. “We are hopeful that adding Moxi as a helpful team member will benefit our nurses by performing those time-consuming tasks that take them away from their patients and let them better focus on the patients and their needs. I am so excited to see this project begin and to watch the implementation roll out.”

After only a few weeks of testing, learning clinical workflows and mapping the hospital environment, the two robots completed their first day and night shift and helped nurses complete dozens of tasks within the first day. As Moxi is fully integrated into the team, the current team of robots will be focused on retrieving medications, lab specimens, and lightweight equipment, saving nurses and the care team hours of time and thousands of steps.  Automating delivery tasks also saves them from having to step away from the unit to complete these tasks.

Moxi was designed and created by Diligent Robotics, a robotics company from Austin that develops artificial intelligence to enable robots to collaborate with and adapt to humans. Moxi is equipped with an arm, gripper hand, and mobility that enable it to transport lightweight medical resources, navigate hospital hallways and drop them off for nurses and other staff.

“What we have seen is that nurses, especially during the pandemic are working long hours and can spend an astonishing 30% of their time fetching and gathering supplies,” said Dr. Andrea Thomaz, co-founder of Diligent Robotics. “That’s a lot of time spent away from patients, so we designed Moxi to be the perfect teammate for nurses and healthcare workers. Having Moxi fetch and deliver items from point A to point B keeps the staff from having to worry about it. We want Moxi to be a capable, useful teammate that supports, not replaces, valued nurses and hospital staff.”

Moxi helps hospitals run 24/7 by assisting clinical staff with non-patient-facing tasks like running patient supplies, delivering lab samples, fetching items from central supply, distributing PPE, delivering medications or any other clinical flow the hospital unit may request.

Designed to be compatible with the busy, semi-structured environments of hospitals, Moxi’s core technical features include: 

• Social intelligence: opens elevators and doors on its own, won’t bump into people or objects in hallways, happily poses for selfies 
• Mobile manipulation: Moxi can interact with the hospitals existing environment such as ADA doors and elevators to gain access across the entire facility without requiring a significant investment in infrastructure.
• Human-guided learning: The more your staff uses Moxi, the more Moxi learns and adapts to your environment and way of doing things