Abstract Recent advances in actuation, control and learning have rapidly pushed humanoid robots from a distant vision towards near-term real-world deployment1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18. Healthcare is a particularly pressing domain, in which staffing shortages and increasing care demand are widening the gap between clinical workload and available skilled labour19,20,21. Although cu...