Remote robotic tech ‘could transform medical assessment in high risk situations’
23 Jul 2023
Research at Sheffield University is claiming a breakthrough in robotics technology enabling remote medical treatment in high-risk emergency environments.
The development of medical telexistence (MediTel) technology is the result of collaboration between the university's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), Sheffield Robotics, and the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.
The trio’s uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV) equipped with virtual reality capabilities allows assessment of critical casualties in hazardous environments, facilitating remote triage while ensuring their safety.
Two robotic arms can remotely operate medical tools to conduct a critical initial assessment of casualties in 20 minutes, with real-time data streamed to operators. Functions include taking temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate measurements, performing abdominal palpations and administering pain relief via auto-injector.
AMRC Head of Digital Design David King and Sanja Dogramadzi, professor of medical robotics and intelligent health technologies at the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering and director of Sheffield Robotics led the project.
King highlighted the project's role developing a casualty triage in hazardous environments, while Dogramadzi emphasised the potential for the platform to be adopted by multiple emergency response services.
MediTel was funded as one of three novel telexistence technologies through a £2.3 million innovation competition led by the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) on behalf of joint funders, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
King and Dogramadzi said MediTel had the potential to develop into a large-scale integrated medical emergency platform, deployable to humanitarian disasters with multiple casualties.
Pic: Ryan Swain (left), technical lead, pictured with Rob Stacey, senior project engineer, both part of the design and prototyping group at the University of Sheffield AMRC - members of the MediTel project team.
