Ryerson and McMaster team on smart robotics health communications project

Ryerson Univ and McMaster Univ are partnering to launch a Smart Robots for Health Communications project aimed at introducing social robotics and artificial intelligence into clinical healthcare. The project will see collaboration between McMaster’s David Harris Smith and Hermenio Lima and Frauke Zeller from Ryerson. They will study health information exchange, developing and analyzing physical and virtual human-robot interactions leading to better understanding of patient behaviour. The team will utilize Softbank’s Pepper humanoid robot and IBM’s Bluemix Watson Cognitive Services to carry out their research. IBM Canada and the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP) will support the integration of Pepper and IBM Watson, providing the researchers with access to high-performance research computing resources and staff.