Medical crash carts — stocked with medications, syringes, gauze, and IV fluids — are essential tools in emergency rooms, where seconds matter, space is tight, and confusion can cost lives. However, despite their importance, crash carts vary widely in layout between hospitals and departments. In high-stress situations, this inconsistency can lead to delays as providers search for supplies or open the wrong drawers. That’s why a team of Cornell researchers set out to reimagine the traditional crash cart, transforming it into a robot designed to support, not disrupt, emergency care teams during critical, time-sensitive procedures.
Their work, led by Angelique Taylor, assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech, was presented in February 2025 at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The team’s paper, “Rapidly Built Medical Crash Cart! Lessons Learned and Impacts on High-Stakes Team Collaboration in the Emergency Room,” shares insights from a multi-year effort to design, prototype, and evaluate a robotic, remotely operated version of the traditional crash cart.
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This project also benefitted from contributions from Maia Hirsch of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion.
