Many of today's healthcare personnel find themselves in a double-bind. The question is how to remain connected, caring and compassionate with patients, while mitigating the impact of chronic workplace stress? Mindfulness is emerging as a means to address this dilemma; it has the potential to both reduce workplace stress and boost employee resilience, while enhancing the patient experience. This article describes the development of a unique collaboration between local hospitals, primary care teams and a university, aimed at bringing mindfulness to life in healthcare. This is a conventional story of program development and evaluation, as well as an unconventional story of personal discovery, community-building, and organizational transformation. Each section of the paper highlights a critical success factor that we have uncovered in our journey, and poses a series of questions for contemplation. This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature by describing the key ingredients for developing and sustaining collaborations aimed at integrating mindfulness into the healthcare system.

This paper proposes a solution to the two-dimensional (2-D) collision free path planning problem for an autonomous mobile robot utilizing an electrostatic potential field (EPF) developed through a resistor network, derived to represent the environment. No assumptions are made on the amount of information contained in the a priori environment map (it may be completely empty) and on the shape of the obstacles. The well-formulated and well-known laws of electrostatic fields are used to prove that the proposed approach generates an approximately optimal path (based on cell resolution) in a real-time frame. It is also proven through the classical laws of electrostatics that the derived potential function is a global navigation function (as defined by Rimon and Koditschek [11]), that the field is free of all local minima and that all paths necessarily lead to the goal position. The complexity of the EPF generated path is shown to be () where is the total number of polygons in the environment and is the maximum number of sides of a polygonal object. The method is tested both by simulation and experimentally on a Nomad200 mobile robot platform equipped with a ring of sixteen sonar sensors.

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This paper presents an analytical model of a flat surfaced robotic gripper designed to automate the process of reliable, rapid and distortion-free limp material handling. The designed gripper prototype is integrated with an industrial robot manipulator. The gripper geometry and its grasp stability are justified. Performance of the overall system is experimentally tested, based on a set of industry dictated operational constraints. It is found that the gripper system has high reliability, grasp stability, and that it is capable of rapid rates of manipulation.

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