NRI: Toward Safe and Reliable Robotic Eye Examinations

This project proposes to enable a complete system for robotic optometric I ophthalmic examination of freestanding patients, including automated cornea , lens, and retinal imaging as well as eyeglass prescription measurement. Robot-aided medical exams have the potential to improve access to preventative medical care, improve health outcomes, reduce costs of care, and reduce disease transmission risk, but they pose safety concerns due to the extremely close proximity of humans and machinery. Moreover, patient interactions are extremely varied , so automating data collection in the "long tail" of anomalous situations requires robust and adaptive perception and decision-making. To address these safety and reliability concerns , this three-year project will integrate basic research in real-time human motion sensing and robot motion planning with applied research in ophthamology and biomedical imaging. This research will be conducted along three aims. Aim 1 will build the robot-mounted sensing instrument by augmenting the proposers' existing work in robotically-aligned optical coherence tomography imaging with additional modalities. Aim 2 will address safety by leveraging recent technical advances in sensors, real-time human tracking , human motion prediction , and robot motion planning to implement active safety systems that eliminate robot-initiated collisions and minimize human-initiated ones. Aim 3 will address evaluation and refinement of safety and reliability using large-scale studies on head / eye phantoms and smaller-scale studies on human subjects.