Medical assistance is important in any field, but it may be hard to do so in certain situations where the medical practitioner's life may be endangered. Just as modern technology advances, engineers have found a way to get past that problem by creating robot medics that can be controlled remotely.
Robotic Medic
The robot was developed by a group of researchers from the University of Sheffield, and it is capable of providing first aid to those who may not be able to receive proper care due to their dangerous situation or current location.
The robot uses medical telexistence technology or MediTel, which was impressively developed in just nine months, as reported by Interesting Engineering. The way it works is that the machine is controlled remotely through virtual reality systems.
It has two functioning arms that can utilize medical tools, which are used to perform proper aid and even provide critical initial assessments within 20 minutes. It is capable of palpating the patient's abdomen as well as administering medication through its auto-injector.
More importantly, it can do so autonomously, all while being supervised through real-time data for the operator, of course. In time, the researchers responsible for the innovative tech intend to add more functions to the robot for future use.
The prototype project was developed under Dstl Telexistence. Its technical lead, Dr. Nicky Armstrong, says that it has the potential to "remove end users from harmful environments and/or rapidly insert specialists as required."
Director of Sheffield Robotics, Sanja Dogramadzi expressed that the project has given them the opportunity to develop a platform that may be used by several emergency responsive services. They plan to enable "resilient autonomy" to assist patient triage in other settings.
This technology can be immensely helpful in a lot of situations, especially in war zones where medical personnel are not able to reach due to life-endangering conflict, or natural disasters where people in need of rescue from a precarious circumstance are also injured.
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Robotics in the Medical Field
While robotics excels in other fields, it has also been used in the medical sector for years. There are a lot of aspects that have been improved with the use of machines, whether it's for efficiency, accuracy, consistency, and more.
It has also contributed to medical research fields where practitioners can allow the robots to do manual, repetitive, and high-volume tasks, as mentioned in Intel, which gives experts more time for more important tasks that cannot be assigned to robots.
Surgical robots have also been developed to create various methods of surgery that are not only less invasive but would also take a fraction of the time that traditional surgeries take. This leads to a more successful outcome and lower costs for the patients.
Medical robots are used to prepare patient rooms automatically, which means that personnel will be less exposed to infectious diseases in particular wards, showing that the innovative approach protects both patients, as well as doctors, and other medical practitioners.
