Interview with Andrea Thomaz (co-founder of Diligent Robotics): socially intelligent automation solutions for hospitals
By Sonia Roberts, with additional editing by Dharini Dutia
Diligent Robotics, founded by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, develops socially intelligent automation solutions for hospitals. Moxi, their flagship robot, delivers items like medications and wound dressings between departments to save the clinical staff’s time. Diligent has just closed their Series B funding round with $30 million.
We sat down with Dr. Thomaz to talk about Moxi, how to manage people’s expectations about robots, and advice for young people and women in robotics. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
What kinds of problems are you trying to solve with Moxi?
We are building Moxi to help hospitals with the massive workforce shortage that they’re seeing now more than ever. We actually started the company with the same intention several years ago before there was a worldwide pandemic, and it really has just gotten to be an even bigger problem for hospitals. I feel really strongly that robots have a place to play in teamwork environments, and hospitals are a great example of that. There’s no one person’s job in a hospital that you would actually want to give over to automation or robots, but there are tiny little bits of a lot of people’s jobs that are absolutely able to be automated and that we can give over to delivery robots in particular like Moxi. [The main problem we’re trying to solve with Moxi is] point to point delivery, where we’re fetching and gathering things and taking them from one area of the hospital to another.
Hospitals have a lot of stuff that’s moving around every day. Every person in the hospital is going to have certain medications that need to be delivered to them, certain lab samples that need to be taken and delivered to the central lab, certain supplies that need to come up to them, food and nutrition every day. You have a lot of stuff that’s coming and going between patient units and all these different support departments.
Every one of these support departments has a process in place for getting the stuff moved around, but no matter what, there’s stuff that happens every single day that requires ad-hoc [deliveries] to happen between all of these departments and different nursing units. So sometimes that’s going to be a nurse that just needs to get something for their patient and they want that to happen as soon as possible. They’re trying to discharge their patient, they need a particular wound dressing kit, they’re going to run down and get it because they want to help their patient get out. Or if there’s something that needs to be hand carried because the regular rounding of medications has already happened, a lot of times you’ll have a pharmacy technician stop what they’re doing and go and run some infusion meds for a cancer patient, for example. It sort of falls between these departments. There’s different people that would be involved but a lot of times it does fall on the nursing units themselves. A nurse explained to us one time that nurses are the last line of defense in patient care.
To read the full article: https://robohub.org/interview-with-andrea-thomaz-co-founder-of-diligent-robotics-socially-intelligent-automation-solutions-for-hospitals/