Bloodbot Stabs You Like A Pro
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 14 of September , 2009 at 2:14 am
Wired posted a gallery on Friday of surgical robots, and Bloodbot here caught my eye, largely because it seemed to be the most practical. The robot consists of an arm with a needle and a probe. In order to find an accessible vein, the robot probes around your arm until it finds an area of flesh that is a little bit less squishy than the rest. Then it jabs you with a needle, and when it feels a little pop indicating that it’s punched through into a vein, it knows to stop the jabbage, lest it go right through the other side of your vein, out the back of your arm, and into your femoral artery, causing a massive amount of hemorrhaging that will no doubt kill you in minutes.
So far, the robot is accurate about 78% of the time.
So, based on this fair and balanced description, what do you think? Would you feel more or less comfortable having a robot (that gets it right more than ‘most’ of the time, of course) suck your blood out as opposed to a human?
And as for the other robots in the slide show, we’ve written about most of them. The other interesting one that we haven’t really covered is ARES, which is a robot that you swallow in pill-sized pieces and it puts itself together in your tummy using magnets. After it does whatever it does, some of the modules will biodegrade while the rest… Uh… Have to come out the old fashioned way. This concept isn’t too much different than the stochastic modular robots that we wrote about in 2007, albeit on a significantly larger scale.
The whole slideshow is available here.
Comments (7)
Category: Medical
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Comment by Jan Schmidt
Made Monday, 14 of September , 2009 at 3:07 am
hrmn – 78% of the time… across all patients, or on any given patient?
I’m a blood donor, and I’ve *never* had a nurse miss the vein. 78% sounds like a 1 in 4 chance of missing to me.. still way too high.
Comment by Evan Ackerman
Made Monday, 14 of September , 2009 at 3:23 am
Across all patients. They say that on each patient the test, “was not repeated, so as to avoid multiple scarring.”
Doesn’t sound too promising when they put it THAT way.
Comment by Melissa
Made Monday, 14 of September , 2009 at 7:02 am
I’m lucky to have good veins, but I think I’d rather have a human. That way I can tell them to stop when they get it wrong.
Comment by Snake Oil Baron
Made Monday, 14 of September , 2009 at 7:15 am
Repeated needle injections in veins over time can build up scare tissue. I used to use my “good” arm for donating blood but when they noticed some scare tissue they recommended alternating arms.
In over fifty donations I have only had a couple of misses. You’re more likely to have them miss a vein when having blood drawn for testing because they often get new people to do it. Here in Canada the Lab tech phlebotomists are usually better at it than the nurses due to more training – they also know how the blood is handled for different tests so there is less likely to be a need for a new sample because of timing or light exposure or using the wrong anticoagulant tube.
I had heard about using infrared cameras and a projector to show humans where the veins are but maybe this could be integrated into the robot to improve accuracy. One problem is that the robot would need to have an abort switch with a human on hand if the patient experienced tingling – it is possible to hit a nerve – usually damage is not permanent but…
Human phlebotomists hit arteries on occation. The key is to not let the patient see you go white when the blood fills up the tube in rapid spirts and to have them hold pressure on the site significantly longer than usual.
Comment by Marunya
Made Monday, 14 of September , 2009 at 8:33 am
I’ll never trust a robot insert to my viens.
Comment by John
Made Tuesday, 15 of September , 2009 at 2:57 pm
First thing I thought of was Levin’s This Perfect Day. Line up, get your regular injections. Will this thing be run by UniComp?
Comment by CK
Made Saturday, 19 of September , 2009 at 1:08 pm
You guys are lucky. Both my father and I have stealth veins. It’s rare that anyone, even a phlebotomist, gets me in less than three tries. Usually they need to use the big needle and poke around like a plumber snaking a drain. I had this Carribean lady once, she got me with the little needle on the first try… I asked for her business card!