When you’re injured in Star Wars there’s always a medical droid not to far away to help. Now it looks like medical robots could be a reality for our planet’s hospitals! Meet InTouch Health’s telemedicine robot RP-7!

RP-7 recently caught the eyes of visitors at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science in Durham. It was part of the Robot Rumble event Saturday. In real medical life, the RP-7 is already helping bring expert neurological advice to three small community hospitals in North Carolina. Neurologist Dr. Charles Tegeler operates the robots from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem.

“We’re trying to leverage technology to be able to bring stroke consultations, bring stroke expertise out to the smaller facilities,” Tegeler said.

Many rural hospitals don’t have a neurologist on staff to make critical decisions about giving stroke patients timely medication to dissolve a clot in the brain. RP-7 allows Tegeler to take long-distance calls about those stroke patients. “I can plug in and get online and beam into the network hospital,” he said.

Sometimes the hospital staff may be too busy to lead him around. “If they just say, ‘You know, we have this patient down in Room 2,’ I drive it right down to the bed side,” Tegeler said. With a robotic stethoscope, he can listen to a patient’s heartbeat. Rather than just talk to doctors or patients on the phone, he can see them face-to-face.

WATCH VIDEO: Robot RP-7 in action

Read the full story here:
R2-D2, MD – Will your next doctor be a robot?
(via LocalTechWire.com)

This entry was posted on March 25, 2010 at 5:11 pm and is filed under robots, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.