- ETRI develops user interface for medical-assistance humanoid robot NAMI

- System wins IDEA Design Award; clinical trials underway at Keimyung University Dongsan Hospital

ETRI's medical humanoid robot platform NAMI.I, which won the IDEA Design Award, is shown during a clinical demonstration. [ETRI]
ETRI's medical humanoid robot platform NAMI.I, which won the IDEA Design Award, is shown during a clinical demonstration. [ETRI]

A technology has been developed that allows doctors and nurses — not just robotics specialists — to assign tasks to humanoid robots intuitively, without complex programming.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced Tuesday that NAMI.I, the user interface for its medical-assistance humanoid robot NAMI, has won a main prize at the American IDEA Design Awards.

The IDEA award is considered one of the world's three most prestigious design honors. The recognition is notable because it was granted not for the humanoid robot's hardware performance, but for the user interface technology that lets medical staff operate a complex robot easily and intuitively.

Hospitals are dynamic environments where medical staff, patients and medical devices are constantly on the move and conditions change at any moment. Conventional industrial robots require trained operators to input programs or manually configure every movement, which limits their usefulness in real-world medical settings.

NAMI.I was designed specifically to lower that barrier to entry. Medical staff can request tasks from the robot intuitively without learning specialized robotic controls, and can easily check the robot's current status and the progress of assigned work.

ETRI envisions NAMI eventually handling routine and repetitive tasks in hospitals — including transporting medicine and supplies, organizing medical materials, guiding patients and supporting daily patient care. By taking on such duties, the robot would free medical staff to focus on their core professional responsibilities: diagnosis, treatment and patient care.

Neurosurgery staff at Dongsan Hospital conduct a clinical demonstration of the humanoid robot platform NAMI. [ETRI]
Neurosurgery staff at Dongsan Hospital conduct a clinical demonstration of the humanoid robot platform NAMI. [ETRI]

The technology is now moving into real hospital environments. ETRI plans to deploy NAMI.I on the NAMI robot and conduct trials with medical staff at Keimyung University Dongsan Hospital.

Medical staff will use the robot directly to evaluate its usability and identify areas for improvement, with findings fed back into the interface design. The institute aims to advance its human-robot interaction technology by accounting for the wide range of situations that arise in a hospital — conditions difficult to replicate in a laboratory — and to build a foundation for commercializing medical humanoid robots.

The global humanoid robot market is expanding rapidly. According to market research firm MarketsandMarkets, it is projected to grow from about $5.4 billion in 2026 to about $50.3 billion by 2035.

ETRI is currently co-developing commercialization technology for medical-assistance humanoid mobile robots with Neuromeka, Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, and KAIST.

"For humanoid robots to provide real help in medical settings, what matters is not just performance but how easily and conveniently medical staff can use them," said Dong Ji-yeon, a researcher at ETRI. "We will refine the technology through hospital trials to make it genuinely useful in real medical environments."


nbgkoo@heraldcorp.com