Robot Claims to be Sick
By Bill Christensen
posted: 17 May 2007 09:40 am ET
A robotic “sick patient” has been created by researchers at Gifu University’s Graduate School of Medicine. They claim that this is the first robotic female patient that is able to both respond verbally to questions about how it feels, as well as move its body in ways that exhibit the symptoms of disease (see photo).
The intent is to provide students with an opportunity to have the closest thing possible to hands-on experience with rare medical conditions. For example, when suffering from myasthenia gravis–an often misdiagnosed neuromuscular disease leading to muscle weakness and fatigue–the robot tells the doctor its eyelids are heavy, and it changes its facial expression, slowly relaxes its shoulders and hunches forward.
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