Development of the airway Management Training System WKA-5: Improvement of mechanical designs for high-fidelity patient simulation

In recent years advanced robotic technology has seen more use in the medical field to assist in the development of Active Training systems. Such training systems must fulfill the following criteria: they must provide quantitative information, must simulate the real-world conditions of the task, and assure training effectiveness. For these reasons, we have developed WKA (Waseda Kyotokagaku Airway) series which can satisfy the above three conditions. However, the mechanical mechanisms of the previous system WKA-4 were not designed to consider internal organs and external appearance. As a result, it cannot simulate high fidelity anatomical organs including tongue, oral cavity, nasal cavity, upper airway and esophagus. Therefore, we are proposing WKA-5 (Waseda Kyotokagaku Airway No. 5), which improves those mentioned defects of the WKA-4. In this paper, we present mechanical mechanism designs such as a mandible and a tongue mechanism which consider internal organs such as upper airway, tongue, nasal cavity, esophagus and external appearance. Finally, a set of experiments was carried out to doctor subjects in order to verify the usefulness of our proposed mechanism, and discuss the doctors on the results of the experiments.