CMUH prices care robot below nursing costs

The hospital-developed system is designed to integrate with clinical workflows.

China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) plans to price its hospital-developed care robot below the cost of hiring a nurse as it seeks to ease staffing pressures amidst rising demand for healthcare services.

“Continued reliance on a labour-intensive care model would affect workforce retention, bed capacity, and patient safety as populations age and chronic illness rises,” Wei-Cheng Chen, chief secretary at CMUH, told Healthcare Asia in an emailed reply to questions.

The hospital developed EirBot with EverBot Technology, a CMUH spin-off, rather than buying an off-the-shelf system.

Chen said CMUH provides the clinical logic, nursing workflows, and governance, whilst EverBot develops the artificial intelligence (AI) models, manufactures the hardware, and handles deployment.

CMUH Superintendent Der-Yang Cho said a robot that can’t connect to a hospital's backend systems is merely “a piece of furniture that looks intelligent.”

EverBot plans to produce about 200 EirBot units this year for subscription-based deployment across major hospitals in Taiwan. About 30 units will initially be installed at CMUH and Taichung Municipal Geriatric and Rehabilitation General Hospital.

Yi-Min Hsu, director of nursing at CMUH, said EirBot could take over about 30% of standardised nursing tasks, including ward orientation, patient education, documentation support, and item delivery.

“Preliminary field monitoring found that in selected item delivery and transport workflows supported by EirBot, related nursing walking distance was reduced by approximately 50%,” Hsu said in an emailed reply to questions.

The hospital also tested EirBot using questions from all seven Taiwanese National Nursing Licensure Examinations administered over the past three years.

Hsu said the robot scored above 90 on every exam, compared with the passing score of 60, which CMUH said was comparable to a top-three national result.

As EirBot expands into post-discharge follow-up, chronic disease management, and home care, Chen said subscription models could eventually extend to government long-term care programmes, insurer-sponsored health management plans, hospital transitional care services, and optional patient-paid services.

Shih-Sheng Chang, director of the AI and Robotics Innovation Centre at CMUH, said EirBot differs from chatbots and wearable devices because it could physically interact with patients, deliver bedside education, and perform ward tasks.

“The first generation provides ward orientation, patient-education consultations, item delivery, remote ward rounds, and video communication,” Chang said.

He said the second generation would add contactless physiological monitoring and environmental sensing to support real-time risk detection and clinical care.