ETRI's Medical Humanoid Robot Interface NAMI.I Wins IDEA Design Award
The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of South Korea has won a main award at the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) for a medical humanoid robot interface. ETRI announced on the 29th that NAMI.I, the user interface for its medical assistance humanoid robot NAMI, received the IDEA Design Award main prize. IDEA is widely regarded as one of the world's top three design awards, alongside Germany's iF Design Award and the Red Dot Award. In 2024, ETRI had already won both the iF Design Award and an IDEA award for the teach-pendant software of MOBY, its autonomous mobile collaborative robot. With NAMI.I, the institute has again shown its strength in user-centered robot interfaces.
NAMI.I is designed to address a practical obstacle in medical robotics: the difficulty healthcare workers face when operating advanced robots. It is a user interface that lets medical staff assign tasks to the NAMI humanoid robot without learning complex robot programming or specialized operating procedures. Through NAMI.I, users can intuitively request that the robot perform a task and easily check the robot's current status and work progress. The interface is expected to lower the barrier for healthcare workers to use robots, increasing the possibility that humanoid robots will be deployed in real medical settings instead of remaining in laboratories and test spaces.
Researchers expect NAMI eventually to assist healthcare workers with a series of repetitive tasks in hospitals. These tasks include delivering supplies and medications, organizing medical items, guiding patients, and supporting patients' daily activities. Such duties are essential but time-consuming, and they could be partly delegated to a robot if the interaction is simple enough. The NAMI.I interface is intended to make that delegation straightforward for clinical staff who are not robotics experts.
ETRI plans to apply NAMI.I to the NAMI robot and conduct a demonstration with healthcare workers at Keimyung University Dongsan Hospital. Medical staff will use NAMI directly in the hospital environment, while researchers comprehensively analyze its convenience, its room for improvement, and the needs raised by staff during use. Based on the demonstration results, the team plans to continue improving NAMI.I's usability and stability. The goal is to lay a foundation for the commercialization of medical assistance humanoid robots.
Dong Ji-yeon, a researcher in ETRI's Intelligent Robotics Research Division, said NAMI.I is a user-centered interface created from the perspective of healthcare workers, allowing a complex robot to be used intuitively. Through the demonstration at Keimyung University Dongsan Hospital, the institute will advance it into a technology that can truly provide help in actual medical settings, Dong said. The comment highlights ETRI's emphasis on usability as a core requirement for medical robots, not an afterthought.
Medical scenarios place different demands on humanoid robots than factories do. Hospital spaces are crowded, people move frequently, and tasks are varied but highly repetitive. Healthcare workers have no time to learn complex robot operations, so the interface must be simple and direct. A robot that is technically capable but difficult to command may not be adopted in wards, clinics, or other care areas. NAMI.I is meant to meet that need by making task assignment and status checking as clear as possible.
The NAMI.I award indicates that for humanoid robots entering hospitals, hardware mobility is only one part of the challenge. How to make robots usable for people unfamiliar with them is another problem that needs to be solved separately. Design awards like IDEA evaluate not only appearance but also user experience, interaction, and practical value. ETRI's recognition therefore points to a broader trend in robotics: as humanoid robots move toward service and medical roles, interface design becomes as important as mechanical performance.
ETRI's previous success with MOBY's teach-pendant software in 2024 already showed that the institute treats robot interfaces as a distinct research area. NAMI.I continues that line of work. If the hospital demonstration confirms its benefits, the interface could help bring humanoid robots closer to routine use in healthcare, where staff need tools that are immediately understandable and reliable. For now, the IDEA award serves as external validation of ETRI's user-centered approach.