Robotic Tutors for Nurse Training | Human-Centered AI and Robotics Group

Registered nurses, as the largest workforce in hospitals, are crucial to maintaining hospital stability and ensuring quality patient care. Training and assessing this vital workforce falls to nursing instructors. Currently, the U.S. faces a severe nursing shortage, leading to high turnover rates and an increasing demand for training new nurses. Consequently, the need for nursing instructors has significantly exceeded the supply. This challenge highlights the necessity for innovative approaches in nurse workforce training, integrating human-technology partnerships.

This project aims to enhance nurse instructors’ training capabilities while freeing up their time for more personalized instruction, ultimately increasing the efficiency of nursing training programs. In particular, we are designing Robotic Intelligent Teaching Assistant Systems (RITAS) for nurse workforce training. RITAS, a blend of virtual and embodied intelligence, will support nursing instructors by assessing trainees’ skills, providing assessment summaries, and delivering customized tutoring. This system is being designed with input from nursing instructors, ensuring its relevance and effectiveness in real-world healthcare settings.

This cross-disciplinary project is a collaboration with the Kavraki Lab of Rice University and the Center for Nursing Research, Education and Practice of the Houston Methodist Hospital. We acknowledge the support of the NSF Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier program which supports multi-disciplinary research to sustain economic competitiveness, promote worker well-being, lifelong and pervasive learning, and quality of life, and illuminate the emerging social and economic context and drivers of innovations that are shaping the future of jobs and work.

Publications

RO-MAN

Robotic Tutors for Nurse Training: Opportunities for HRI Researchers

Carlos Quintero-Peña*, Peizhu Qian*, Nicole Fontenot, H Chen, Shannan Hamlin, Lydia Kavraki, Vaibhav Unhelkar

In IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2023

Abstract PDF

An ongoing nurse labor shortage has the potential to impact patient care well-being in the entire healthcare system. Moreover, more complex and sophisticated nursing care is required today for patients in hospitals forcing hospital-based nurses to carry out frequent training and assessment procedures, both to onboard new nurses and to validate skills of existing staff that guarantees best practices and safety. In this paper we recognize an opportunity for the development and integration of intelligent robot tutoring technology into nursing education to tackle the growing challenges of nurse deficit. To this end, we identify specific research problems in the area of human-robot interaction that will need to be addressed to enable robot tutors for nurse training.