Angelique Taylor’s healthcare robotics seminar was November 23 at 1pm ET.
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Title: Social Navigation for Mobile Robots in the Emergency Department
Abstract: The field of robotics is growing at a vast pace with deployments in everyday environments such as hospitals, schools, and retail settings. Until recent years, the field of human-robot interaction (HRI) has focused on dyadic interaction (i.e., one human and one robot). However, recent work highlighted the importance of designing robots to interact with groups of people, understand how people work together, as well as how to work alongside them as this reflects what robots will encounter in real-world settings.
In my prior work, I designed, implemented, and evaluated perception methods to enable robots to detect and track their team in real-world environments. Then, I explored the use of robots in healthcare, a dynamic setting in which teams experience coordination, communication, and decision making challenges, that have contributed to the death of over 400,000 patients annually in US hospitals alone. Nurses are often penalized when they speak up to stop behavior from physicians that causes errors. To address this challenge, I conducted a human-centered collaborative design study where I interviewed nurses to investigate how we can best support and empower them. To further investigate HRT in safety-critical environments, I explored using robots in the Emergency Department (ED) where providers are overburdened, overworked, and have limited resources to do their jobs. Patients are often placed in hallways when bedrooms overflow; therefore, I developed a new navigation system to enable robots to take patient acuity into consideration while planning paths in the ED to prevent patient care interruptions.
Bio: Angelique Taylor is a PhD Candidate in the Healthcare Robotics Lab in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of California San Diego. She is advised by Dr. Laurel Riek. Her research lies in the intersection of computer vision, robotics, healthcare, and artificial intelligence which aims to design algorithms that enable robots to interact and work with groups of people (human-robot teams) in safety-critical environments. Angelique is also a National Science Foundation GRFP Fellow, Arthur J. Schmitt Presidential Fellow, GEM Fellow, Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholar, National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT), Microsoft Dissertation Grant, and Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) Scholar. She received her BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2015 and AS in Engineering Science from Saint Louis Community College in 2012.
