Rapidly Built Medical Crash Cart! Lessons Learned and Impacts on High-Stakes Team Collaboration in the Emergency Room

Rapidly Built Medical Crash Cart! Lessons Learned and Impacts on High-Stakes Team Collaboration in the Emergency Room Abstract --Designing robots to support high-stakes teamwork in emergency settings presents unique challenges, including seamless integration into fast-paced environments, facilitating effective communication among team members, and adapting to rapidly changing situations. While teleoperated robots have been successfully used in high-stakes domains such as firefighting and space exploration, autonomous robots that aid high-stakes teamwork remain underexplored. T o address this gap, we conducted a rapid prototyping process to develop a series of seemingly autonomous robot designed to assist clinical teams in the Emergency Room. We transformed a standard crash cart--which stores medical equipment and emergency supplies into a medical robotic crash cart (MCCR). The MCCR was evaluated through field deployments to assess its impact on team workload and usability, identified taxonomies of failure, and refined the MCCR in collaboration with healthcare professionals. By publicly disseminating our MCCR tutorial, we hope to encourage HRI researchers to explore the design of robots for high-stakes teamwork. Teleoperated robots have become indispensable tools for action teams--highly skilled specialist teams that collaborate in short, high-pressure events, requiring improvisation in unpredictable situations [1]. For example, disaster response teams rely on teleoperated robots and drones to aid search and rescue operations [2], [3]. High-stakes military and SW A T teams use teleoperated ordnance disposal [4] and surveillance robots [5] to keep the teams safe. Surgical teams employ teleoperated robots to perform keyhole surgeries with a level of precision that would be unimaginable without these machines [6], [7]. We built three teleoperated medical crash cart robots (MCCRs). MCCR 1 delivers supplies using a hoverboard circuit. MCCR 2 delivers supplies, recommends supplies using drawer opening capabilities, and was deployed at a medical training event which revealed insights.