Pa. researchers create robots to perform triage during emergencies

The speed of determining who needs care in a mass casualty event can be life-saving.

University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University researchers, known as Team Chiron, have developed an autonomous medical triage system. This system aims to enhance the ability of medical personnel to triage patients using robotics. With their noninvasive detection system, they are competing in the three-year, $7 million DARPA Triage Challenge.

Team Chiron’s triage solution 

According to a Pittwire article, team Chiron’s goal is to detect and identify physiological injury signatures using an autonomous system. This allows medical teams to prioritize the most urgent casualties efficiently.

“When we have a significant emergency where there could be danger to the responders, you can save lives by not sending in a human right away,” said Leonard Weiss, associate professor of emergency medicine at Pitt and a member of Team Chiron. “This autonomous triage system allows us to provide rapid help to as many victims as possible without needing extra human power.”

The technology uses autonomous robots to classify human injuries from a distance by integrating emergency, medical, and prehospital data points into algorithms. This helps emergency teams to determine who is most at risk by observing injury patterns and vital signs through the robots’ data.

One challenge is managing distance, as there are limits on communication ranges, data transmission, and battery life of the robots. The team is working on scaling this operation.

Team Chiron tests their technology in a simulated environment the size of a soccer field with 10 to 15 victims. Beginning in a controlled environment helps identify issues to fix as the system scales up. They hope the robots could eventually provide interventions such as medical care or transport.

“We want to utilize the speed of a computer and the strength of robotics to add to what human talent already has,” Weiss said. “If we can create a trustworthy and dependable system, we can protect humans from hazards in mass casualty events while saving as many lives as possible.”

Learn more about the DARPA Triage Challenge from Carnegie Mellon.