In high-risk emergency situations where doctors are unable to enter engineers create robot doctors, there is a novel method to approach casualties. University of Sheffield researchers have created a robot doctor that can administer first aid in life-threatening circumstances, saving lives while safeguarding medical staff. This is in accordance with a Friday press release from the organization.
Leveraging MediTel Technology
The innovative device, which was created in just nine months, leverages medical telexistence (MediTel) technology. It has two robotic arms, virtual reality systems, and the ability to autonomously administer pain relief via an auto-injector while streaming real-time data to the remote operator. These capabilities allow it to perform a critical initial assessment of a casualty within 20 minutes.
“Our MediTel project has demonstrated game-changing medical telexistence technology that has the potential to save lives and provide remote assessment and treatment of casualties in high-risk environments such as humanitarian disasters,” said David King, project lead and head of digital design at the University’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre.
A remarkable feat and a credit to the expertise of the entire project team, developing and field testing a cutting-edge, sophisticated technology like MediTel in only nine months. “MediTel developed a platform that allows a remote operator to navigate through potentially difficult terrain and provide critical diagnoses of high-risk casualties by combining existing medical devices with cutting-edge robotics systems.”
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What Experts say?
The Defence and Security Accelerator held a two-phase innovation competition that raised money for the new robot doctor. It might soon be used in dangerous settings like conflict zones and humanitarian disasters. Dr. Nicky Armstrong, technical lead at Dstl, stated that “Telexistence technologies have the potential to remove end users from hazardous environments and/or rapidly insert specialists as required.”
“We have been able to demonstrate the art of the possible to end users thanks to the prototype technologies developed under the Dstl Telexistence project, so that we can better understand where telexistence could add value to defence and security environments.” However, the team still wants to give the robot doctor even more functionality, so the job is not over.
“This project gave us the chance to create a platform that different emergency response services could use. Sanja Dogramadzi, professor of medical robotics and intelligent health technologies at the university’s department of automatic control and systems engineering and director of Sheffield Robotics, said in a statement, “It now provides us with the basis for our research to be extended and look into enabling resilient autonomy and integrating other sensing modalities to assist patient triage in other remote settings.”
