Penn Engineering and Penn Nursing Team Up To Build Inflatable Robots for Hospital Beds

By Izzy Lopez

To get inspiration for this emerging field, soft robotics engineers often look to nature. Pikul has studied octopuses — an organism with an entirely soft body — and how they transform the texture of their skin to camouflage into their surroundings. He and colleagues from Cornell developed a soft robotic system inspired by this ability; now, he is expanding on this technology. The soft robots Pikul has in mind will go beyond just changing their appearance since they’ll be tasked with safely lifting and moving hospital patients.

“The challenge here is that controlling soft materials is very difficult,” Pikul says. “If I build with something soft, how do I control it to make it do something useful? That’s the question we are trying to figure out.”

“Nurses’ injuries are a big problem,” Pikul says. “Many highly qualified nurses are leaving the profession early due to the difficulty of moving patients around. And, as nurses leave the field, the burden is increased for the nurses who remain and the cycle continues.”

“It’s not always one big injury,” says Nina Solis, a nurse in the Hematology and Oncology ward at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the hospital’s Committee for Safe Patient Handling. “If you’re assisting a patient into a chair and they put their weight on you, you might not get a severe injury from that, but the repeated strain and smaller injuries can compound over time and lead to a major issue.”

“More than that, manually moving a patient is very invasive,” Solis adds. “Often times, complete patients — patients who cannot move themselves at all — aren’t fully aware of why they are being moved. They get anxious and uncomfortable and sometimes people refuse to be moved. I think if there was a technology to move patients more discreetly, the patients themselves would be more relaxed and get more rest.”

Pikul’s technology has the potential increase patient comfort as well. “When you think about it,” Pikul adds, “a hospital bed is already a robot. It bends to different shapes and has sensors to monitor vital signs. They’re already sophisticated systems, they’re just bad at moving people. And we want to fix that.”

Cacchione is excited about the collaboration between Penn Engineering and Penn Nursing and the potential of their joint research.

“It has been really fun working with Penn Engineering, and I’ve enjoyed it very much,” says Cacchione. “There is great synergy between the Schools of Nursing and Engineering because the Nursing school has access to patients and clinical ideas. We are working together to conceptualize engineering ideas and apply them to something that will be meaningful for a patient.”

“This project is about education too.” Pikul says. “Hopefully, the interaction between Nursing and Engineering will give the nurses an appreciation for the capabilities of robotics in modern healthcare, and give roboticists appreciation for the challenges of working with people.”

With his National Science Foundation-funded research, Pikul is laying the groundwork for soft robotics as an innovative field that will help to create the future of robots. Pikul wants to build robots that are safe for close contact with humans and will open up new jobs for robots in everyday life. If he can achieve this, then robots as we understand them will be forever changed as they move from industrial machines on factory floors to intimate technologies involved in all aspects of human health, home and care.

“Safe interaction with robots will be the future of work,” Pikul says. “More and more we are going to be surrounded by and assisted by technology and we want to make sure that we’re doing that in an environment that doesn’t endanger humans. Ultimately, we want people to use these robots so that they make a difference and improves people’s lives.”

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