[Taichung, July 19, 2026] A student team from Asia University’s Wisdom Sustainable Development Living Laboratory (WSDL Lab), advised by Professor Augustine Tsai of the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Professor Ryan Tsai of the Department of Computer Science and led by doctoral student Yun-Chien Shen, won third place in the student division’s Innovation and Creativity category at the 2026 Central Taiwan Startup Master Competition and CTSP Startup Carnival. The final was held on July 17 at the Robot Center of the Central Taiwan Science Park.
Precision health is at the heart of the team’s project. THE-FM (Taiwan Healthcare Embodied Foundation Model) is designed around real hospital workflows and combines vision-language-action (VLA) technology, healthcare-domain data, high-performance computing, and clinical workflow knowledge to serve as the software brain of healthcare and long-term care service robots. The goal is to help robots understand their environment, recognize tasks, and take appropriate actions—not merely follow isolated commands—so they can support navigation, delivery, inspection, handover, and human-robot collaboration. In this way, precision health can move beyond data analysis and become part of day-to-day hospital and long-term care operations.
The team plans to train THE-FM with NVIDIA H100 computing resources, targeting 25,000 GPU hours, while integrating ten key technologies for healthcare robotics. By understanding both medical workflows and the needs of each situation, THE-FM is expected to improve task completion and collaboration reliability in dynamic, safety-critical environments, reduce the workload on healthcare professionals, and enable technology to respond more precisely to patients, caregivers, and clinical teams.
The competition was organized by Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council and the Central Taiwan Science Park Bureau and implemented by the Industrial Technology Research Institute to connect academic innovation with industry needs. Sixteen teams advanced to the final. WSDL Lab earned recognition from the judges by linking embodied AI with precision health, smart healthcare, and long-term care services.
The Asia University team will continue validating THE-FM in clinical and long-term care settings, with a focus on safety, interpretability, and workflow adaptability. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, the team aims to translate human-centered precision health technologies into reliable real-world services.