‘Moxi’ the Robot that Supports Nurses | Diligent Robotics

Diligent Robotics, a small business funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), created “Moxi,” a robot that supports clinical staff teams in acute care hospitals by executing logistical tasks so staff can focus on direct human care.
Moxi safely and autonomously navigates the hospital and has an arm and gripper hand that allows it to pick up things like supplies and deliver them to other places such as outside patient rooms, providing a variety of support tasks for the clinical staff. Diligent Robotics cites statistics that indicate that 30 percent of nurses’ time is spent on “nonvalue-added” logistical tasks like gathering supplies, resulting in nurse burnout.
While at Georgia Tech in 2008, Diligent Robotics CEO Andrea Thomaz received an NSF research award to develop implementations and experiments on humanoid social robots. Two years later, Thomaz won an NSF CAREER award to research socially guided machine learning for robots. When her CAREER award finished, she signed up for the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program in 2015. After I-Corps, Diligent Robotics received an NSF SBIR Phase I award for $225,000 in 2016 and an NSF SBIR Phase II award for $500,000 in 2017.
Diligent Robotics is supported by America’s Seed Fund powered by the NSF, a $200 million per year program that awards research and development grants to small businesses and startups, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. To learn more visit: diligentrobots.com/.