Wi-Fi robot helps treat trauma patients

U of Miami med center tests Wi-Fi–connected virtual physicians

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

A robot roaming from bedside to bedside at the Ryder Trauma Center at the University of Miami/Jackson Medical Center in Florida is expanding the reach of physicians in an initiative that could one day extend to U.S. soldiers overseas.

Locally powered by a battery pack and networked by Wi-Fi, a 5-foot-tall RP-7 robot made by InTouch Health "stands in" for doctors after their eight-hour shifts have ended, explains Frank Rodriguez, IT director of network and security operations at the medical center.

Coolest robots of 2009

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A robot roaming from bedside to bedside at the Ryder Trauma Center at the University of Miami/Jackson Medical Center in Florida is expanding the reach of physicians in an initiative that could one day extend to U.S. soldiers overseas.

Locally powered by a battery pack and networked by Wi-Fi, a 5-foot-tall RP-7 robot made by InTouch Health "stands in" for doctors after their eight-hour shifts have ended, explains Frank Rodriguez, IT director of network and security operations at the medical center.

Coolest robots of 2009

The robot makes rounds and communicates interactively via a monitor mounted on top of the robot's "body" that connects remote doctor, patient and on-site staff wirelessly in a videoconference.

The Ryder Trauma Center is a Class One trauma center, where military training is conducted, Rodriguez notes. "The hope is that this technology could someday virtually bring physicians to any location, even the battlefields in the Middle East," he says.

The robot doesn't directly treat or operate on patients. Rather, the monitor, which serves as the "head" of a remote specialist who might be at home, in an office or elsewhere, becomes a consultant to other medical professionals in the room, supervising treatment or surgery. The doctor can also remotely ask questions and talk with a patient via the monitor, communicating over an SSL VPN.

"The robot is very sensitive to wireless signal strength, so everything's got to be perfect or the robot might stop," Rodriguez says.

So the university medical center has built a pervasive Meru Wi-Fi network of 3,500 APs that are installed in elevators, stairwells, outdoor areas and even on the helipad on top of the building. Given that every second counts in a trauma patient's diagnosis and treatment, Wi-Fi must be ubiquitous and nearly 100% reliable, Rodriguez says.

He explains that the Meru Wi-Fi architecture doesn't hand off calls from AP to AP, because it centralizes roaming decisions, and that it avoids co-channel interference by tuning all devices to a single channel. These traits align with the center's top Wi-Fi priorities of reliability and availability, he says, by minimizing session interruptions and user reauthentications.

Rodriguez explains that one incoming gunshot victim had X-rays taken on the helipad, which were immediately sent via Wi-Fi to the operating room. "By the time the patient got to the room, the surgeon was viewing a 30-inch monitor displaying the X-rays rather than having to wait 20 minutes for them to be developed," says Rodriguez says.

The surgeon indicated that this setup "saved this particular patient's life," he adds.

The center also heavily supports voice over Wi-Fi using both Vocera low-power badges and Cisco 7921 and 7925 VoWLAN phones. Given the sensitivity of real-time voice to hand-offs and delays, the voice application was another driver behind the center's decision to use the Meru architecture, says Rodriguez says.

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Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.