Rapid Prototype Blog

Posts Tagged ‘star trek’

its one step closer to STAR TREK Until then, it is first step close to prototyping. Great for art! testing or just making something at home in case of emergency. 3D Printer @ CES 2010

Besides being the most successful franchise in the history of television, Star Trek – from “The Original Series” through “Enterprise” – sparked the imaginations of scientists, inventors and those who just had a desire to see its advanced technologies appear in the real world.

Perhaps not surprisingly, that is happening much more frequently than Gene Roddenberry and his successors anticipated. The global flip-phone bears a striking resemblance to Captain Kirk’s hand-held communicator, for instance, and the Internet is humanity’s first attempt at a Memory Alpha. But some of the most interesting evolutions from science fiction to fact are happening in medicine.

Current senior military medical officers believe a rudimentary version of Dr. “Bones” McCoy’s medical tricorder will be fielded with the US military. Not “at some time in the future”. Not in a couple of decades. But within just a few years. Possibly even before the end of this decade.

in fact, the US Army is already beginning to field the first elements of its new Land Warrior battle ensemble, which will upgrade a soldier in the field from being a cog in the combat wheel to a central and primary element of a new system-of-systems approach. The success of this effort currently is essential to medicine since the continuing research and development (R&D) side of this continuous process – Future Force Warrior (FFW) – is analyzing some compelling advances apart from protecting soldiers from being injured, but in caring for them should they be wounded.

US military injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan already hold the record for the fewest “killed in action” (those who perish in combat before they receive medical care) of any conflict in human history. That is largely due to two factors: Advanced body armor that has nearly prevented head and torso wounds and superior medical intervention on the battlefield. That ranges from medics (and Navy corpsmen) who are trained to a higher degree and are better equipped than their predecessors, to surgeons who were put on the front-lines during the primary combat phase.

As a result, the “golden-hour, as it’s called, has turned into what one Army surgeon calls the “platinum 10 minutes” – the time from the instant a soldier is wounded until he (or she) receives life-saving medical care.

Continuing breakthroughs are aimed at developing armor to protect arms and legs – the most common locations for wounds, mostly from explosions and fragmentation, among US military personnel today. The ultimate, should the final quirks be worked out, would be the FFW prototype, which just about everyone likens to the full-body armor worn by the imperial troops in Star Wars.

Much closer to reality are other Future Force Warrior elements that may well become integral to standard military kit in the coming years. For example, systems that constantly monitor the individual’s vital signs, fluid intake, patterns of sleep, passing that information instantly (and wirelessly) to any medic. It may even send out a radio call to the closest medic should those vital signs indicate a soldier has received a injury.

Not a hand-held tricorder, but getting there.

Soldiers will also wear electronic dog tags containing their entire (updated regularly) medical histories, making it possible to tailor any medical intervention, taking into account allergies, drug interactions or other medical conditions or recent treatments. That could include updates at each stage of care along the evacuation line from where the soldier was wounded all the way back to a hospital in the US.

Every soldier, Marine, sailor and airman also will be issued a personal first aid kit that contains, among other things, a single-handed tourniquet and special bandages that instantly clot the blood to stop bleeding (rapid blood loss remains the number one why soldiers die on the battlefield). Each also will be trained in advanced first aid – and one in six (at least) will receive advanced training as a Combat Life Saver (CLS). While it receives a non-medical rating, the Combat Life Saver will provide assistance, as needed, to regular medics, as well as adding one new layer of on-site support to his or her fellow combat personnel.

Medics and corpsmen also are undergoing significant upgrades in both equipment and training. With the addition of a constant stream – and history – of data from each soldier and the ability to “reach back”, with both video and audio, to higher levels of medical expertise, from the Forward Surgical Team operating within the sound of front-line gunfire to top-notch specialists in the US, the Future Warrior Medic will be able to give an superlative level of medical care within minutes of a soldier being injured.

Some of these elements are already in place in Southwest Asia; most will be used within a few months. Others due in the near future include:

A testing kit using biomarkers to determine whether brain injury has occurred and how severe that injury might be

Automatic controls built into ventilators, that allows medics to deliver a level of resuscitation currently only available from intensive-care nurses

Hand-held ultrasounds that can pinpoint internal injuries

A digital handbook of diagnostic and treatment protocols medics can carry into combat

Small oxygen generators that can turn ordinary air into medical-grade oxygen

A system that can quickly identify and diagnose 10 biologic weapons threats, including anthrax, smallpox and plague

Replacing blood without the need to use refrigerated blood bags

An advanced, self-contained training simulator for medics (not a holodeck, but also getting there)

While these breakthroughs are aimed at providing quick, competent medical treatment to military personnel, they will also become part of the medical field capability the US Armed Forces will be able to provide to civilians and enemy combatants.

Prior to the current conflict, US military medicine was not intended to care for children, the elderly or illnesses and diseases not found among the young, physically fit members of the armed forces. Now – and to an even greater extent in the future – such care will be integral to the training and equipment the Navy, Army and Air Force will bring to war and to humanitarian and disaster relief missions, too.

Within the careers of some in uniform today, future civilian and military R&D may even go beyond what the doctors of Star Trek could achieve. The Surgeon General of the Army, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, has written that he thinks one of the “most exciting possibilities in modern medicine” to be the ability to repair or re-grow lost or damaged tissues and limbs. “Regenerative medicine”, Kiley says, is the subject of propitious research that he feels “has implications for military medicine in the near future”.

McCoy’s sickbay on the Enterprise was set in the 23rd Century, some 200 years from now. It may well be, though, that “Bones” would find himself old-fashioned and outdated in the midst of 21st Century combat medicine. We can only dream of the advances to come in the next 50-100 years, let alone the next 200!