Team creates device to help disabled medical student examine patients

The student became paraplegic after a swimming accident when she was a teenager. She is paralysed from her chest down, with limited use of her hands.

The invention consists of a long, flexible wire with a camera that can display live images of a patient's skin, eyes, ear, nose, throat and mouth onto any mobile device. It can also enhance images and has its own WiFi network to ensure the recordings are safety transmitted. This solution allows Molly, despite her limitations, to perform full-body patient exams with limited physical contact.

“Very few universities accept first-year medical students who are paraplegic or quadriplegic. Historically, certain people have been dissuaded from areas of medicine. Most of the imaging systems that doctors use require the doctor to be up against the patient’s ear or mouth or nose. The physician’s eye has to be collinear with the object being examined. If the patient is lying down, going to the other side of the patient isn’t always possible, as some examination rooms aren’t big enough to take a wheelchair around both sides”, David Burke explained.

As they recognised patient examination would be a major challenge for a student like Molly, they decided to take action and develop a solution that would allow her to examine a patient’s skin, eyes, ears, nose, throat and mouth from a distance.

The team’s goal is to keep working on improving the innovation: they want to incorporate video recording and use 3D-tracking tech to measure a patient's strength and mobility during a neurological exam without having to make direct contact with the patient. The ultimate goal is that this device can help disable doctors everywhere.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/2WSo6hB
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