Robots scheduling nurses and assigning rooms to patients

It's not hard to imagine that robots and artificial intelligence will become more and more a part of the health care sector. It's easy to see how a robot companion or device could assist older patients in their homes or perhaps keep them out of the hospital, but what about on an active Labor and Delivery unit? A 2016 robot made decisions that 90% of doctors and nurses agreed with in regards to L&D nurse scheduling and patient room assignment. 

What do you think? Is there a future for robots in health care? 

Full story at http://news.mit.edu/2016/robot-helps-nurses-schedule-tasks-on-labor-floor-0713

"Today’s robots are awkward co-workers because they are often unable to predict what humans need. In hospitals, robots are employed to perform simple tasks such as delivering supplies and medications, but they have to be explicitly told what to do.

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) thinks that this will soon change, and that robots might be most effective by helping humans perform one of the most complex tasks of all: scheduling.

In a pair of new papers, CSAIL researchers demonstrate a robot that, by learning from human workers, can help assign and schedule tasks in fields ranging from medicine to the military...."