The Intelligent Medical Stapler: Ending the Emergency Room Crisis

Overview

Emergency rooms are overcrowded with patients who have lacerations, the most common injury after broken bones. Such cases require a simple treatment, sutures or staples; yet, a doctor must complete the procedure. As a result, doctors spend valuable time on stitching for sometimes half their day. The goal of this project is to design a robot to perform medical staple autonomously. Overtime, the design of a delta robot with six axes of rotation and camera tracking was selected. The base is a rotary delta system, which uses three motor powered arms, with three joints per arm, all of which are connected to a parallel end effector. This end effector holds a rotational plate; this component allows the robot to follow curved lacerations. A tilting platform is offset from the rotational plate to perform staples along the side of a patient. Most of the components are 3D printed, with some CNC-machined metal and MDF parts. The tilting plate is the final effector and can move along six different axes. A USB camera and a medical stapler are attached to the plate. During testing, the robot held up to significant stress testing, and the motors achieved a twenty percent margin over the desired range of motion. The computer vision software identified most skin and lacerations effectively, and the kinematics of the delta robot translated effectively into Cartesian motion. In the future, through further development to increase precision, the Intelligent Medical Stapler can transform overcrowded, overworked emergency rooms into hubs of medical innovation.

Competition history

• JSHS 2020 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.