Glimpses of future battlefield medicine - the proliferation of robotic surgeons and unmanned vehicles and technologies

Abstract

The rescue of severely wounded soldiers, while under fire, is itself a major cause of military death and traumatic injury. Some sources estimate that up to 86% of battlefield deaths occur after the first 30 minutes post-injury. Hence life saving training techniques and treatments, and more recently, the application of robotic surgical systems (RSS; Fig.1), technologies and unmanned vehicles (UVs), have been developed to provide battlefield casualty extraction, critical life-saving interventions, and physiological monitoring, in order to reduce this incidence. Although not invincible themselves, when it comes to enemy small arms fire, UVs and RGPs can sustain a lot more direct fire than can the average human soldier, hence their utility in combat first responder scenario's.