The current issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article on the DARPA Trauma Pod project.

“Robot surgeons promise to save lives in remote communities, war zones, and disaster-stricken areas

Our role in the project isn’t described, though the University of Maryland is mentioned, but then we are a subcontractor to a subcontractor of a subcontractor. Our research for this project has included work on RFID tagging and tracking and implementing a resource management system that captures a medical encounter record that records information about the surgery as well as the perioperative period. Some of this is described in “Context-Aware System to Create Electronic Medical Records”.

Here’s more from the Spectrum article.

DARPA is promoting its vision of the operating room of the future primarily through its Trauma Pod program. It’s an ambitious initiad RFID tagging and tracking and automatically capturing a medical encounter record that records the entiretive managed by Richard M. Satava, a professor of surgery at the University of Washington. Satava, a hospital commander in the first Gulf War, was prompted by his experiences there to think about how technology could improve battlefield medical care.

Satava’s main objective with Trauma Pod is to use robotics to project the skills of surgeons to precisely where they’re needed on the battlefield. How to do that? Using an unmanned, mobile operating room that expert surgeons can control at a distance. The concept is in line with the current trend of reducing personnel and logistics on the battlefield through the use of autonomous and teleoperated systems. The U.S. Department of Defense expects to reduce deployed personnel by up to 30 percent by 2025.

Behind this vision is a multiphased program led by SRI that includes contributions from the University of Washington, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Maryland, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as from companies like General Dynamics, Intuitive Surgical, General Electric, Robotic Surgical Tech, and Integrated Medical Systems.

Related posts:

1. Trauma Pod at DARPATech 2007
2. Semantic Web in Medical Diagnosis
3. Doctors cautious about RFID implants
4. DARPA exploring geoengineering
5. Google robot-controlled car frees users to text