Abstract

The emergency department (ED) is a safety-critical environment in which mistakes can be deadly and providers are over- burdened. Well-designed and contextualized robots could be an asset in the ED by relieving providers of non-value added tasks and enabling them to spend more time on patient care. To support future work in this application domain, in this pa- per, we characterize ED staff workflow and patient experience, and identify key considerations for robots in the ED, including safety, physical and behavioral attributes, usability, and training. Then, we discuss the task representation and data needed to situate the robot in the ED, based on this do- main knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on robot design for the ED that explicitly takes task acuity into account. This is an exciting area of research and we hope our work inspires further exploration into this problem domain.