Politico September 16, 2025
FORWARD THINKING
So-called soft robotic arms are helping to change health care — squeezing into hard-to-reach places in the human body.
What’s new: A new study on the technology finds that although the soft-arm robots can successfully guide a breathing tube into a person’s windpipe — like the ones developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara — the technology and the procedure is best suited for emergency room settings.
That’s because even well-trained doctors can struggle to properly see a person’s windpipe, despite extensive training in endotracheal intubation, according to a study in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Still, researchers found that the use of the device for intubation had high success rates among highly trained doctors,...
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