Scoping an Industry Safety Standard for Assistive Robots in Health and Social Care

Assistive robotics are promising as a means to alleviate the health and social care crisis. However, any assistive robot must provide a quality and safety of service that is verifiably equivalent to human practitioners. At present, there are no safety or performance standards for assistive robots interacting in physical proximity with end-users, which presents a significant barrier to their deployment.

This project will engage with health/social care regulators, practitioners, manufacturers, and end-user groups to develop a draft standard that it is contextually relevant, generalizable across different assistive robot platforms and acceptable to user communities, ready for submission to standards agencies.