If you couldn’t get enough of Baymax in ‘Big Hero 6‘, or at least the idea of having a robotic personal healthcare assistant, then you might be in luck. Apparently, it looks like a team from Duke University are attempting to bring the spirit of what Baymax was meant to be to life!
The robot named Trina (Tele-Robotic Intelligent Nursing Assistant) is a two-armed concept being built by The School of Engineering and School of Nursing. The idea is exactly like one of the key points from the series in that it will be there to assist nurses in high-risk healthcare situations. It isn’t meant to be quite the live-in health provider that Baymax had evolved into but more of a hands-on robot for when outbreaks and worse occur.
The idea stemmed from the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and would be used to treat patients which would be difficult for regular nurses to work with. Currently, it has a screen for its face which display’s the human’s face which is controlling it. At this time it can only do simple things such as moving trays, drinks, and the like. Long term though the plan is to have these deployed to be controlled by real-life nurses in situations that would be dangerous, or as in the case of Ebola contagious, to the nurse.
You can check out what they’ve put together so far in the video below:
We’re not quite at the point yet where we’d have a full-on artificial intelligence to help save people’s lives but at the very least it looks like in dangerous situations this might one day be a great alternative to directly putting a nurse into harm’s way.
Are you excited about the future of robotics in the healthcare profession or do you think that this will be just another step towards our eventual being ruled by robot overlords? Share your thoughts below!
Source: Mental Floss
Stuart Conover is an author, blogger, and all around geek. When not busy being a father and husband he tries to spend as much time as possible immersed in comic books, science fiction, and horror! Would you like to know more? Follow him on Twitter!
