Handheld Robotic Device for Difficult Tracheal Intubation

Military Medicine is ill-prepared to provide prolonged prehospital combat casualty care on impending austere battlefields. The military’s next conflict will impose logistical constraints and crisis-level demands to medical resources. Medical unit leaders are expressing concern that these distances from hospitals paired with a shortage of expert medics will increase pre-hospital death tolls. The Department of the Air Force (DAF)  is prioritizing multi-capable airmen in agile combat employment operations, and technologies that allow non-experts to act in roles they were not trained to perform. Airway is the first checklist item for trauma medics before administering other lifesaving care since airway compromise is reported as the second leading cause of mortality on the battlefield after hemorrhage. Once the airway is blocked or compromised, it’s a race against the clock to intubate a patient to ensure they are getting oxygen before brain damage and death. But a compromised airway almost always necessitates a Difficult Tracheal Intubation (DTI) where First-Pass Success (FPS) intubation rates in out-of-hospital settings are as low as 46.4%. In combat trauma and other conditions which narrow the airway (airway swelling, cancer, etc.) one out of five tracheal intubations is a  DTI, with patient death rates around 80% due to low FPS. In combat settings, field hospitals, and other austere environments there is currently no safe and guaranteed way to perform a DTI, particularly by lower level medics. In the next impending near-peer conflict multi-capable airmen will need to provide high-level Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC), including DTIs.Spiro Robot can turn average airmen into intubation experts. Spiro Robot is unique, novel, and innovative in that it uses an advanced video-robotic module which enables Artificial Intelligence (AI) to instantly recognize the airway anatomy and direct the robotic endoscope for precise airway navigation and breathing tube placement–without associated forceful airway manipulation or trauma that frequently accompanies DTIs. Spiro Robot will enable lesser trained medics to perform complex DTIs–saving lives on the battlefield and during patient transport. Furthermore, Spiro stands to reduce costs of intubation by $2000-$4000 per intubation compared to the use of the current DTI “gold standard,” Video Laryngoscopy (VL).