The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 11, 2008

Official News page 8


REAL LIFE NEWS: THE FIRST ROBOT ANESTHESIOLOGIST

by Hazed

Robots are taking over the world! Not content with building our cars, cleaning our houses and mowing our lawns, they have been steadily taking over much more critical jobs too. Now, a group of researchers have come up with the world's first robot anesthesiologist. It's called McSleepy. Awww, cute name!

Anesthesiologists are the doctors that put you to sleep before you have an operation, and then monitor you during the surgery, standing by to administer drugs should it be necessary. They stop you from waking up while you're under the knife, and on the other hand they make sure you don't get too much anesthetic, which would be bad for you.

Now, researchers from Montreal's McGill University have invented a device that could replace humans with robots in this role. McSleepy has just successfully completed its first surgery, administering drugs to a patient having a tumor removed from his kidney.

Given how important anesthesia is during surgery, and how it is potentially one of the most deadly parts of an operation, I am not sure I'd be happy to have it taken care of by a robot. Sure, there would be no human error, but in return you'd have to worry about software errors, bugs, system crashes... I think McSleepy is going to need an enormous amount of testing before it can be trusted!


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