Patient Lifting Robot: From Hoists to ABB Cobot Safety

Moving a person from a bed to a wheelchair is one of the heaviest jobs in care, and for most of history people did it by hand. A patient lifting robot is meant to take that strain off nurses and family carers without hurting the person in its arms. This post follows the job from hand lifts on hospital wards to the Hoyer lift, ceiling hoists and Japan's RIBA and ROBEAR prototypes. Then it looks at this autumn's care robot news and at what ABB's GoFa cobot, with its power and force limiting, can and cannot teach a machine that has to hold a human body.

Student nurses learn how to move a patient from bed to wheelchair, November 1942. Photo: Fritz Henle / Office of War Information, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How nurses lifted patients before machines

For most of the twentieth century, lifting patients was simply part of the job. Around 1919, Royal Navy sick-berth attendants on the hospital ship HMS Warrior practised lifting patients by hand, since they carried the sick on and off the ship as well as doing other menial work. Nursing schools taught the same skills on the ward. In November 1942 the photographer Fritz Henle recorded American student nurses teaching probationers how to get a patient from bed to wheelchair. Lifting by hand, often with two or more staff, remained the normal method in many hospitals for decades afterwards.

Royal Navy sick-berth staff practise lifting patients on the hospital ship HMS Warrior, around 1919. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Machines came slowly. In 1949 Ted Hoyer, left quadriplegic by a car accident at 16, built a powered lift in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with his cousin Victor Hildemann, and Ted Hoyer and Company followed in 1951. A hydraulic arm on a wheeled base lifts the person in a sling, and "Hoyer lift" is still a common name for the type. Liko, founded in Sweden in 1979, became one of the big makers of mobile and ceiling-mounted lifts. Policy took longer. The Royal College of Nursing published a code of practice for handling patients in 1996, and in 2003 the American Nurses Association launched its Handle With Care campaign for a national policy against manual lifting.

A Hoyer-type mobile patient lift, with the spreader bar and chains that hold the sling. Photo: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robots that lift people came from Japan. In 2009 RIKEN and Tokai Rubber Industries showed RIBA, a bear-faced robot that could lift a patient of up to 61 kg from a bed into a wheelchair and back. In 2015 RIKEN and Sumitomo Riko presented ROBEAR, an experimental 140 kg robot, much lighter than the 230 kg RIBA-II of 2011, with torque sensors and soft rubber touch sensors to apply force gently. Panasonic's Resyone, a bed whose one half splits off as a powered wheelchair, became the first robot certified to the new ISO 13482 standard for personal care robots in April 2014. Cyberdyne took the wearable route: its HAL suits, shown here in 2010, later included a lumbar version for care staff who lift.

A HAL powered suit from Cyberdyne on display, 2010. Photo: Yuichiro C. Katsumoto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Care robots in 2026: lifts, beds and companions

This autumn's news shows where care robots stand. On 16 September 2026, developers in Seoul showed care machines to health officials, The Korea Times reported. A compact indoor mobility robot from Daegu Catholic University Medical Center climbs 100 mm thresholds and helps patients to and from the bathroom. Daewon Inmul showed a capsule-style shower chair that lets bedridden patients bathe with less physical effort from nurses, and another exhibitor showed a quiet bed that shifts a patient's position by itself to help prevent pressure sores. None of these machines picks a person up the way RIBA did.

A shower room with a mobile patient lift and a shower bed. Photo: Mikael Granberg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Two other stories point the same way. On 30 September Neura Robotics announced Neura HealthTech and a mobile robot that slides under empty hospital beds, lifts them and moves them between wards and floors, elevators included. Neura expects it to save more than 1,300 working hours a year per hospital at about 20 trips a day, though it carries only empty beds. On 1 October the BBC visited Vera, 74, at Hazelhurst Court in Lewisham, London, where her Cera robot, Robert, gives medication reminders and company, and 24 residents use the same robots. In both cases the robot carries, reminds or keeps company, and staff still do the transfer itself with hoists.

A ceiling-mounted patient lift with its sling hanging above a bed. Photo: Hadifn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make a patient lifting robot, and its cobots are far too small for one. The GoFa CRB 15000 carries 5 kg, and the GoFa 10 and GoFa 12 variants added in 2023 take 10 and 12 kg, while an adult patient weighs many times that. What carries over is the safety design. GoFa has torque and position sensors in each joint, limits its power and force so it can work beside people without fences, and can be moved by hand to teach a path. ROBEAR relied on the same ideas, torque sensing and soft contact, to lift gently. An ABB arm that lifts people would only be a research possibility, and it would need medical certification.

Moving an ABB GoFa CRB 15000 by hand. Torque sensors in each joint let it feel contact. Photo: ABB

What patient lifting robots need next

In homes, the likely next step is smarter hoists and beds. Ceiling lifts, bed-to-chair designs like Resyone and beds that shift a patient's position already remove much of the lifting, and adding motors and sensors to them costs far less than building a humanoid that can carry an adult. Our post on elder care robots covers the wider set of machines, from companion robots to cobots. Carers who still lift by hand have another option in wearable support, which we looked at in exoskeletons and heavy lifting.

A patient lift built into a bedside cabinet, from the Norwegian maker Integra, lifting a man from his wheelchair. Photo: Integracp / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Hospitals will probably automate the moving around a patient before they automate lifting the patient. Neura's robot carries empty beds, and delivery robots already move linen, meals and samples, as described in our post on hospital delivery logistics. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs, which find their way with 3D Visual SLAM, move loads in factories today. A similar robot that drives under a bed or a mobile hoist could save nurses many pushes and pulls in a shift, but ABB has not announced one, so it remains a possibility.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Robots that lift people directly still face hard problems. Every patient has a different weight, shape and condition, and a sling or arm has to cope with fragile skin, catheters and pain. The machine must stop safely if something goes wrong halfway through a lift, which is why ISO 13482 and torque sensing matter so much. A robot also costs far more than a simple hoist, and carers need training and trust before they hand a parent or patient to one. Force control and safety monitoring, the skills engineers practise on cobots like GoFa, are the same ones a lifting robot will depend on.

Lead-through programming: a person moves a GoFa arm by hand to teach it positions. Photo: ABB

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