Researchers built an autonomous system to help detect the most urgent victims in mass casualty events

The time it takes to determine who needs care in a mass casualty can be a matter of life or death.

University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University researchers known as Team Chiron have developed a medical triage system using autonomous robotics that will enhance medical personnel's ability to triage patients in the field. The team will compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) three-year, $7 million DARPA Triage Challenge using their noninvasive remote-detection system.

Team Chiron is participating in the systems competition of the challenge with the objective of detecting and identifying physiological signatures of injury using an autonomous system. By determining who is most at risk, medical personnel can prioritize the most urgent casualties.

"When we have a significant emergency where there could be danger to the responders, you can save lives by not sending in a human right away," said Leonard Weiss, associate professor of emergency medicine at Pitt and member of Team Chiron. "This autonomous triage system allows us to provide rapid help to as many victims as possible without needing extra human power - an essential gap to fill when medics are limited."

The technology works by deploying autonomous robots to identify and classify human injuries from a distance. Multiple layers of emergency, medical and prehospital data points integrated into algorithms and decision tree processes provide a view of the information in the field. By observing injury patterns and vital signs through the robots' data collection, emergency medical teams can objectively determine who is most at risk and strategically send help, rather than relying on limited medical personnel to triage numerous patients in a large area.

One challenge with this approach is distance. There are limits on communication ranges, data transmission and the battery life of robots and drones. The larger the scale, the more difficult the triage - which is why the team is now working on scaling up this operation.

Team Chiron is testing their technology in a simulated environment the size of a soccer field with 10 to 15 victims - but activating the technology in a real-world scenario will prove more difficult. Beginning with a controlled environment allows the team to identify roadblocks and issues that need to be fixed as the system is scaled up. The team hopes that one day the robots could provide intervention themselves, whether that's medical care or transport.

"We want to utilize the speed of a computer and the strength of robotics to add to what human talent already has," Weiss said. "If we can create a trustworthy and dependable system that does not inhibit our progress, but enhances it, we can protect humans from hazards in mass casualty events while saving as many lives as possible."

Learn more about the DARPA Triage Challenge from Carnegie Mellon.

Photography by Leonard Weiss