This robot doctor was designed to go and treat patients where human doctors can’t.
“The medic could drive a robotic system to a location and perform a series of different kinds of triage tasks on that patient,” said David King, the head of digital design at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. King was one of the leaders of the project.
Medics can remotely operate the robot’s arms and talk to the patient.
“They wear a virtual reality headset and the robot itself has got a 360 degree camera on it,” he said.
The robot was developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield in the UK.
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The robot can take a patient’s blood pressure and temperature, check their pulse, and administer injections, among other tasks. All of this can be seen and performed by the remote medic controlling the robot in real time.
“It’s also [applicable] to anywhere where you've got casualties and you don't really want to be sending people,” King said.
This could include humanitarian disaster areas, like earthquake zones for example, war zones, and sites of biological or chemical accidents.
The robot is still being tested in representative outdoor terrain on dummies.
King said it took them 9 months to go from concept to functioning design, as part of a competition.
Researchers are looking for partnerships with organizations to deploy these into specific disaster zones.
