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May 20, 2025
In light of the globally projected shortage of nurses, which could exceed four million by 2030, technology giant Foxconn is focusing on innovative solutions in the field of AI-powered healthcare. A central component of this strategy is the collaborative nursing robot "Nurabot."
Nurabot is designed as a "cobot" intended to relieve nurses of time-consuming and physically demanding tasks. This includes, for example, the transport of medications and samples within hospital wards. However, the robot is only one building block of Foxconn's comprehensive smart hospital concept, which is based on NVIDIA technologies and is already being tested in leading medical centers in Taiwan. Further components include AI models for more accurate monitoring of patient conditions and digital twins of entire hospitals, which support management in planning and design.
The vision is to link these applications to create an intelligent, AI-driven hospital. Foxconn is pursuing a three-stage computing strategy: First, large AI models are trained and optimized on dedicated supercomputers. Then, digital twins serve as a test environment for planning, validation, and even training the robots. Finally, edge computing systems enable fast AI-supported decisions directly on the robots and sensors in the hospital.
Pioneers of this transformation are several Taiwanese healthcare facilities, including Taichung Veterans General Hospital (TCVGH), Baishatun Tung Hospital – Mazu Hospital, and Cardinal Tien Hospital. They are using Foxconn's smart hospital solutions not to replace medical personnel, but to improve patient care.
Shu-Fang Liu, deputy director of the nursing department at TCVGH, emphasizes: "Taiwan has a highly developed healthcare infrastructure with a strong focus on digital transformation. This creates ideal conditions for the integration of robotics. Robots expand our capabilities, allowing us to offer more focused and meaningful care."
Foxconn uses its Honhai Super AI Computing Center 1, equipped with NVIDIA DGX systems, to develop AI models specifically for the healthcare sector. These are deployed via Foxconn's CoDoctor AI platform, also based on NVIDIA AI, and are already improving diagnostic accuracy and optimizing clinical workflows for tasks such as retinal imaging, vital sign monitoring, arrhythmia detection, and cancer screening.
Beyond these foundational models, Foxconn is collaborating with medical centers to integrate the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization. This could include analyzing real-time video streams for immediate detection of medical events or creating concise visual summaries for hospital management to improve both immediate response and long-term planning.
Furthermore, Foxconn is also engaged in the open-source community. The company will make CoroSegmentater, its AI model for coronary artery segmentation, available to the open-source platform MONAI for medical imaging.
Nurabot, jointly developed by Foxconn and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, combines the FoxBrain LLM for natural interaction, virtual training through Isaac for Healthcare, and fast onboard processing thanks to the NVIDIA Holoscan sensor processing platform on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin device.
Foxconn estimates that Nurabot could reduce the workload of nurses by up to 30% once it is fully integrated into clinical workflows – by delivering medications, transporting samples, and monitoring wards.
Initial results from the Nurabot test at TCVGH are promising and are viewed positively by both nurses and patients. The hospital plans to deploy dozens of these robot units by the end of the year.
The combination of AI and robotics has the potential to reshape healthcare and demonstrates how technology can complement, rather than replace, human care.
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