Florida Patent of the Month – February 2022
Inserting a needle or a cannula may seem like simple procedures, but nurses and doctors spend a great deal of time learning how to do it while minimizing pain or discomfort for the patient. Unfortunately, as many patients can testify, it remains a largely unmastered technique. Nobody wants to be poked with a needle over and over but sometimes the vein is hard to find, or the angle is not quite right. Veebot Systems, Inc. is committed to perfecting needle insertion procedures. This means taking the guesswork out of the procedure.
To remove the guesswork, they have designed an autonomous, image-guided robotic needle inserter. This robotic system uses a combination of medical imaging, computer vision, AI and robotics to reliably align and insert a needle. The robotic arm has a series of sensors which gather information about the patient and the potential insertion site. The AI is trained to use this data to identify the best target insertion site which it then tracks in real time. Additional medical imaging then identifies the optimal depth below the skin for insertion – i.e. how deep the vein is positioned. It’s this step that removes those missed sticks and gets it done in one go. Following this verification, the needle is robotically inserted and can then be either (a) depressed to administer the fluid or drug or (b) aspirated to draw blood or sample.
This method can reduce the number of attempts needed for a successful needle insertion which not only improves patient experience, but reduces the prep time needed for a procedure.
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