Rovex and Sphaira pioneer autonomous patient transport

Last month, I attended eMerge Americas hosted by Melissa Medina in Miami. The conference showcased South Florida’s burgeoning innovation engine, with startups promoting groundbreaking tech in healthcare, defense, AI, and hardware.

An equally impressive plenum of speakers included household name-brand CEOs, generals, influencers, and even the president’s son. Clearly, the nexus of innovation is beginning to shift away from the Northern coasts down to the (tax-free) Sun Belt.

Walking the floor, I sought out robot companies in the eMerge alligator alley. Amid the mix of drone and autonomous vehicles, Rovex Technologies stood out with its autonomous hospital bed. The startup was the brainchild of emergency room doctor David Crabb. He had been charged with overseeing his department, tackling bottlenecks in moving patients through the hospital system.

One of the most glaring examples of waste was the length of time it took for patients to be seen by the imaging staff. The entrepreneur said he discovered that it took “over an hour to get 200 yards down the hall.” This led to high rates of patient dissatisfaction, revenue loss, and increased worker-compensation claims.

“Transporters have a really tough job,” explained Dr. Crabb. “They have one of the highest injury rates of any job in the U.S., and a very high turnover at some institutions. They leave in about six months, 100% turnover in one year.”

“So I started looking for ways we could move patients autonomously,” he said. “And then we settled on having something that they can grab onto — stretchers, wheelchairs, beds, etc. — and tow them along safely down the hall so that you can speed the process up of caring for the patient and get the workers back to the bedside being able to take care of patients hands-on, rather than just pushing stretchers and beds around. You’ll always need a human touch in certain areas, especially with patients who are altered or anxious around things like automation.”

Rovex add autonomous mobility through towing

Rovex has developed a autonomous patient-transportation system that works with existing beds and gurneys. It has a robust obstacle avoidance to safely navigate down hallways, but as Dr. Crabb shared, the robot’s intellectual property is its towing hardware.

“One of the core pieces that we’ve developed in-house is around how we grab and integrate with caster wheels, free-spinning wheels,” he said. “We’ve gone through four to five different iterations of how to safely and efficiently grab them with good control, quickly, and maintain good control over the stretchers, wheelchairs, or beds as we move.”

Crabb noted that the data layer could eventually be his most powerful asset. “The data is probably the biggest opportunity in that space,” he said. “There are only so many [robots] out there moving around autonomously, so we’re continuing to build our algorithms to do that safely.”

“Social interaction with people as they’re going through can be chaotic,” Crabb acknowledged. “Healthcare workers have an endless list of needs. So I’d say the data is a really important part.”

“I think the No. 1 consideration when you’re moving around is that this is a vulnerable population,” said the doctor. “You have to do it safely. You can’t move quickly. You have to make sure the patient is in control and still feels in control of what’s going on, so give them that control to make sure they feel safe.”

“As a clinician, our No. 1 priority is patient safety first, do no harm,” asserted Crabb. “It is my own ethos as a physician, so the first thing we install is an emergency stop button for the robot, as well as an emergency release to make sure you can grab it and move it out of the way as easily as possible.”

BayCare Health System tests transport robot

The Robot Report reported last month that Rovex received a major endorsement when BayCare Health System announced a pilot program to test its robots in real-world settings at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Fla. The hospital plans a phased program to evaluate how the startup’s systems will move through the facility and integrate with existing workflows. Early testing is focused on navigation rather than patient movement.

“Delivering better patient care requires innovation across every aspect of hospital operations,” said Craig Anderson, vice president of innovation at BayCare. His team indicated that the goal of the pilot will be to evaluate whether Rovex can be scaled across its 16 facilities in West Central Florida to increase efficiency and maintain safety.

“What’s most compelling about this pilot is the chance to closely evaluate and learn,” said Dr. Chris Bucciarelli, BayCare’s chief medical officer for ambulatory services. “By studying how robotics may support patient transport in a real hospital environment, we can better understand how to design care systems that support both patients and staff.”

Other innovators address hospital movement

While Rovex has developed a novel click-and-tow platform, it is not the first company to automate patient transport.

At CES 2025, MOVED unveiled “an autonomous driving bed designed to transport surgical patients efficiently via dedicated elevators, ensuring privacy and cleanliness.” While this futuristic form factor caught a lot of attention in Las Vegas, there has been little news from its South Korean creator, OGGMA, since then.

ReviMo, part of the fourth cohort in the MassRobotics Healthcare Robotics Startup Catalyst Program, has developed Niko, a lifting device for people with mobility issues. Able Innovations‘ ALTA automatically transfers patients from hospital beds to gurneys without ergonomic strain on hospital personnel.

In addition, robots are already operating in hospital hallways as they provide logistical support for pharmaceuticals, equipment, and linens. These include systems from Aethon, Relay Robotics, and Diligent Robotics (which was acquired by Serve Robotics in January).

Editor’s note: The Robotics Summit & Expo will include a session on hospital logistics with Aethon, Rovex, and SKA Robotics. MassRobotics will also introduce startups in its Healthcare Startup Showcase. Register now to attend next week’s event in Boston.

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Moby is a ‘bubble on wheels’

The broader opportunity in patient transport was further underscored this past year at Endless Frontier Labs, where I met Janis Münch, CEO of Sphaira and the inventor of Moby, a mobile protective transportation system complete with air filtration.

“Medical isolation is either you’re immunocompromised or highly infectious,” he explained. “Now, what we did was develop a mobile protective bubble on wheels. It’s a medical device in Europe.”

“We’re undergoing FDA approval, and this has been in use for 1.5 years at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, arguably the most famous European hospital,” added Münch. “We are now doing a clinical study with Stanford Children’s Hospital.”

Sphaira develops shuttles for the Mayo Clinic

Münch continued to outline his long-term plan to create fleets of autonomous patient and people movers, building on Moby’s success. In October 2025, Sphaira announced a development agreement with the Mayo Clinic for autonomous patient shuttles.

“So the idea is a pod, a one-person shuttle, elaborated Münch. “It’s an autonomous wheelchair with passive protection. We map the building beforehand to create a digital twin, and then it drives through the building, moving in every direction.”

When I asked Münch why he chose to focus on an autonomous chair rather than a bed or gurney, the German entrepreneur replied, “It’s actually been more manageable, because we’re only going in the main hallways right now, but when you start thinking about doing the autonomous bed, we would need a bigger partner.”

“A Stryker or [another big partner] would be wonderful at one point, once our robotic infrastructure layer is installed. You have to get into every room, and this is a much bigger effort,” he added. “So we’ve already put a lot of thought into this. We haven’t come up with the perfect solution yet, but our first step is the parts, which brings us into the hospitals, so we are already there, and then we can think of all kinds of use cases, and then expand our infrastructure.”

Follow the unit costs

All the founders in the space boasted of cost savings, increased revenues from greater hospital efficiency, and improved patient outcomes. However, Sphaira’s chief executive stated it best:

“An average patient transporter, depending on the region, is somewhere around $43,000 a year. And when you look at how patient transport works, and you analyze it, you always have a peak during the day. Most are in the morning, with some around noon, depending on how their operations work.”

“Now these peaks are staffed with two or three shifts of patient transporters. That means one of our units can replace two to three patient transporters, which really puts us in a completely different league from a unit perspective.”

“Most [hospital] robots are supportive, increasing efficiency by 5%, 10%, or 15%, whereas we’re increasing efficiency by 200 to 300%. That’s really the core difference here, and that is also why it is an easy sale,” said Münch.