TRINA: a Real-life Baymax!

My favorite Disney movie is Big Hero 6 - it's got an awesome story, relatable characters, and most importantly, Baymax. In the movie, Baymax is a "personal healthcare companion" who address the medical needs of humans. With the need for healthcare providers on the rise, we could definitely use a baymax-type robot. Creating such a robot presents some challenges, but one promising candidate is a robot named TRINA, the Tele-Robot Intelligent Nursing Assistant.

Qualifications

Baymax a squishy, harmless, yet useful robot that can interact with humans and help them in the right way. Here's why that's a challenge for roboticists to design:

• The robot has to be at least semi autonomous, which means programmers would have to anticipate situations ahead of time. 
• Navigating in a human environment is challenging because even simple things like depth perception require a lot of code. On top of that, there are often unpredictable elements, forces, and situations that designers need to take into account. 
• As a healthcare aid, this robot would have to diagnose, then treat many different illnesses and problems. This requires a lot of code, and the robot would have to be capable of fine movements to treat the patient. 
• Each human patient is different. The robot would have to know how to react to unexpected human reactions, and ideally, it could communicate with patients. 

The list goes on and on, but courageous robotics at Duke University are working to overcome these challenges and create a healthcare robot named TRINA. 

TRINA

The Tele-Robot Intelligent Nursing Assistant, or TRINA, is designed to interact with patients in high risk environments. For example, TRINA would act as a nurse, providing help to patients who have a highly contagious diseases like Ebola. At this point in time however, TRINA is only capable of doing simple tasks like moving trays and cups. Of course, TRINA has great potential to do much more.  

Personally, I've always wanted to help sick people feel better, but I'm just really squeamish when it comes to germs and other gross things. So I think TRINA is extra cool because it's evidence that I still can use my interest in Computer Science to help sick people. But it doesn't stop there - computer science and robotics have countless other applications in today's world.