A new face is lighting up hospitals and nursing homes across the country.

It’s an animated, cartoonish persona displayed on a digital screen roughly the size of an iPad, mounted on top of a robotic torso shaped like an elongated traffic cone. It slowly rolls around from place to place, cracking jokes with patients, making silly faces, and playing small games.

Named Robin the Robot, it already seems to be a hit with its young patients — and hospital staff.

“She brings joy to everyone,” Samantha da Silva, a speech language pathologist at HealthBridge Children’s Hospital in Orange County, California, told the Associated Press. “She walks down the halls, everyone loves to chat with her, say hello.”

Designed to behave and sound like a seven-year-old girl, the therapeutic robot is the latest

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