Around the world, well being care employees are in brief provide, with a scarcity of 4.5 million nurses anticipated by 2030, in line with the World Health Organization (WHO).
Nurses are already feeling the strain: round one-third of nurses globally are experiencing burnout signs, like emotional exhaustion, and the occupation has a high turnover rate.
That’s the place Nurabot is available in. The autonomous, AI-powered nursing robotic is designed to help nurses with repetitive or bodily demanding duties, corresponding to delivering treatment or guiding sufferers across the ward.
According to Foxconn, the Taiwanese multinational behind Nurabot, the humanoid can cut back nurses’ workload by as much as 30%.
“This is not a replacement of nurses, but more like accomplishing a mission together,” says Alice Lin, director of person design at Foxconn, also referred to as Hon Hai Technology Group in Taiwan.
By taking up repetitive duties, Nurabot frees up nurses for “tasks that really need them, such as taking care of the patients and making judgment calls on the patient’s conditions, based on their professional experience,” Lin advised NCS in a video name.
Nurabot, which took simply 10 months to develop, has been present process testing at a hospital in Taiwan since April 2025 — and now, the corporate is readying the robotic for industrial launch early subsequent yr. Foxconn doesn’t presently have an estimate for its retail value.
Foxconn partnered with Japanese robotics firm Kawasaki Heavy Industries to construct Nurabot’s {hardware}.
The agency tailored Kawasaki’s “Nyokkey” service robotic mannequin, which strikes round autonomously on wheels, makes use of its two robotic arms to carry and maintain gadgets, and has a number of cameras and sensors to help it acknowledge its environment.
Based on its preliminary analysis on nurses’ day by day routines and ache factors — corresponding to strolling lengthy distances throughout the ward to ship samples — Foxconn added options, like an area to securely retailer bottles and vials.
The robotic makes use of Foxconn’s Chinese giant language mannequin for its communication, whereas US tech large NVIDIA supplied Nurabot’s core AI and robotics infrastructure. NVIDIA says it mixed a number of proprietary AI platforms to create Nurabot’s programming, which allows the bot to navigate the hospital independently, schedule duties, and react to verbal and bodily cues.
AI was additionally used to coach and check the robotic in a digital model of the hospital, which Foxconn says helped its speedy growth.
AI permits Nurabot to “perceive, reason, and act in a more human-like way” and adapt its habits “based on the specific patient, context, and situation,” David Niewolny, director of enterprise growth for well being care and medical at NVIDIA, advised NCS in an electronic mail.
Staffing shortages aren’t the one problem going through the well being care sector.
The world’s aged inhabitants is rising quickly: the variety of folks aged 60 and over is anticipated to increase by 40% by 2030, in comparison with 2019, in line with the WHO. By the mid-2030s, the UN predicts that the variety of people aged 80 and older will outnumber infants.
Over the previous decade, the variety of well being care employees has steadily increased, however not quick sufficient to beat inhabitants development and growing old. Southeast Asia is anticipated to be one of many worst-impacted regions for well being care workforce shortages.
With these impending stressors on the well being care system, AI-enhanced methods can present enormous time and value financial savings, says nursing and public well being professor Rick Kwan, affiliate dean at Tung Wah College in Hong Kong.
“AI-assisted robots can really replace some repetitive work, and save lots of manpower,” says Kwan.
There will likely be challenges, although: Kwan highlights affected person desire for human interplay and the necessity for infrastructure modifications in hospitals.
“You can look at the hospitals in Hong Kong: very crowded and everywhere is very narrow, so it doesn’t really allow robots to travel around,” says Kwan. Hospitals are designed round human wants and methods, and if robots are to change into central to the workflow, this can must be reimagined in hospital design going ahead, he provides.
Safety can be paramount, says Kwan — not simply by way of mitigating bodily dangers, however the growth of moral and information safety protocols, too — and he encourages a sluggish and cautious strategy that enables for rigorous testing and evaluation.
Robots should not completely new to well being care: surgical robots, like da Vinci, have been round for many years and help enhance accuracy throughout operations.
But more and more, free-moving humanoids are aiding hospital employees and sufferers.
In Singapore, Changi General Hospital presently has greater than 80 robots serving to medical doctors and nurses with all the pieces from administrative work to medication supply.
And within the US, almost 100 “Moxi” autonomous well being care bots, constructed by Texas-based Diligent Robots with NVIDIA’s AI platforms, carry medications, samples, and supplies throughout hospital wards, in line with NVIDIA.
But the jury remains to be out on how useful nursing robots are to employees. A recent review of robots in nursing discovered that, whereas there was a notion amongst nurses of elevated effectivity and diminished workload, there’s a lack of experiential proof to substantiate this — and technical malfunctions, communication difficulties and the necessity for ongoing coaching all offered challenges.
Tech corporations are investing closely well being care: along with NVIDIA, the likes of Amazon and Google are each exploring new alternatives within the $9.8 trillion health care market.
The good hospital sector is a small, however quickly increasing, part of this. It was estimated at $72.24 billion in 2025, in line with market analysis firm Mordor Intelligence, with the Asia Pacific area the fastest-growing market.
Nurabot is presently being piloted in Taichung Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan, on a ward that treats illnesses related to the lungs, face and neck, together with lung most cancers and bronchial asthma.
During this experimental section, the robotic has restricted entry to the hospital’s information system, and Foxconn is “stress testing” its performance on the ward. This consists of monitoring metrics just like the discount in strolling distance for nurses and the supply accuracy, in addition to qualitative suggestions from sufferers and nurses. Early outcomes point out that Nurabot is lowering the day by day nursing workload by round 20–30%, in line with Foxconn.
Taichung Veterans General Hospital declined to touch upon Nurabot for this story.
According to Lin, Nurabot will likely be formally built-in into day by day nursing operations later this yr, together with connecting to the hospital info system and working duties autonomously, forward of its industrial debut in early 2026.
While Nurabot received’t clear up the dearth of nurses, Lin says it could help “alleviate the problems caused by an aging society, and hospitals losing talent.”