Robot takes on the role of scheduling nurse in a busy hospital labor ward

We hear plenty of stories about AI being used in medicine, whether it's discovering new drugs or helping diagnose diseases based on symptoms which may be imperceptible to even expert physicians. One area we've not previously heard about machines working in, however, is in the role of "resource nurse" in a hospital. A nurse in this position in the labor and delivery ward is responsible for making decisions about the rooms patients should be assigned to, or which physician should perform a C-section. That's work that researchers in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) attempted to replicate recently -- with a Nao robot trained to learn how these scheduling choices are made and make similar decisions on its own. "What we were able to show is that a system with only a few dozen training examples from people performing a task very well was able to make decisions which appear to be reasonable," Professor Julie Shah, of of the authors of the study, told Digital Trends.