Her name is Noelle, and she's a child-bearing blonde. She's also a robot.

Noelle, a full-sized mannequin, seems to be all the craze in dozens of hospital and medical schools, as she it allows medical students to get a real feel of delivering a child — without actually having to do so.

The robotic mannequin, from Miami-based Gaumard Scientific, increasingly is being used in a number of medical schools and hospital maternity wards. As a recent Associated Press (via Wired News) article pointed out earlier this month, Noelle is in demand "because medicine is rapidly abandoning centuries-old training methods that use patients as guinea pigs, turning instead to high-tech simulations."

Simply put, med students get less flack for making a mistake on a $20,000 robot than on a live patient.

"It's a really effective way to teach people how to take care of patients without harming actual patients," says Robbie Prepas, a Laguna Beach midwife who is a consultant to Gaumard.

(via Gaumard Scientific)

According to the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, as many as 98,000 patients in the United States die each year from preventable medical errors. As such, Noelle should come as some relief to women about to enter motherhood, as trial and error with the feminine robot can minimize the number of living patients being used as medical students' test subjects.

While Noelle can spend hours in labor and produce a breach baby, it also can begin to give birth instantly, thus keeping doctors highly alert. The robot can be programmed for cervix dilation and can even breathe and emit realistic pulse rates, urine and extensive bleeding.

An engineer with the control of a wireless keyboard can overwrite preprogrammed instructions instantly, sending wireless signals to Noelle, and thus inflict a number of sudden complications.

Ultimately, the computerized mannequin delivers a plastic doll. The baby mannequin is wired to flash vital signs when hooked up to monitors and can change face color from a "healthy pink glow to the deadly blue of oxygen deficiency."

AP reports one of Noelle's recent uses at Kaiser Permanente's Vallejo hospital:

About 50 doctors, nurses and others involved in caring for pregnant women attended the training session, which started with Noelle hooked up to standard delivery monitoring machines and tended to by nurses and doctors. David Isaza, an engineer with Gaumard, sat in a corner with a laptop, sending wireless signals to Noelle. With a keystroke, he can inflict all sorts of complications, overriding any preprogrammed instructions. As Noelle's heart rate increased, a nurse examined her under the sheets. An umbilical cord was visible — not a good thing. Immediately, the nurse called a "code 777." Several more medical personnel burst into the room and wheeled Noelle off to the operating room where she gave regular birth to twins after a frenzied 20-minute operation.

Noelle is used in most of hospital chain Kaiser Permanente's 30 hospitals nationwide, while other hospitals continue to submit orders. The Northwest Physicians Insurance Company is sponsoring similar training programs in 22 hospitals in Oregon and Idaho, rolling out Noelle initially at five of them.

Although the Noelle robotic mannequin is just now making its way around the U.S., there are rising concerns about importing this technology to less-developed countries that suffer from a high infant mortality rate. For instance, Afghanistan — which has the world's second-highest infant mortality rate, according to the U.S. State Department — has seen at least three different models of the training tool put to use.

Hopes come that Noelle will help train physicians to help take better care of their patients, while preventing potential harm.

Source

Med Students Train on Robots
Associated Press (via Wired News), April 16, 2006