Meet Nurse Jetson

While searching on “nursing” in the news, I found this article about Cody, the new nursing robot.  The article details a test run of this new robot’s nursing skills as he was “told” to wipe blue candy off a patient. I guess he “got most of it” and so they’re calling it a success.

Cody is partially controlled by humans, meaning a nurse can control his actions, follow what he’s doing (via live cam) and he comes with an automatic “kill switch” in case he decides to go haywire.

Call me crazy, but I think this is taking technology in nursing a step too far.  Apparently the patients, while initially shocked that they were being cared for by a robot, actually warmed up to him, if that’s possible, considering he’s made of metal.

We’re getting a bit too “Jetson-y” for my taste. I remember being a kid and thinking that in the year 2000, we would have hover cars and our own Rosie Robots and computers on our watches. And while the latter has pretty much been achieved in the form of cell phones, we’re still only a few years ahead of where we were back then. We still need that connection with each other. What really frustrated me on top of it all was the last line in the article: “Considering how hard nurses work already, they’ll probably welcome a bit of help from robots.”  Yes, we work hard, but I’m sorry, I’m not welcoming Cody, or his robot family onto the floors just yet.

I’m sure loads of money have been put into creating Cody, but to me, if we’re subbing in robots for nurses, we’re leaving out an integral interaction between nurses and patients. I have always thought that there’s something in nursing that is very essential to humanity, and that something can’t be replaced by a robot.