Subaqua Sternal Rubs

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (CNN) — Imagine a computer program so clever, it senses the level of pain a patient is in and measures the exact amount of pain relief and sedative drugs they need.

A team of New Zealand engineers and medical experts is working on a device that will be able to do just that.

They hope their development will eventually be available for commercial use, potentially saving hospitals throughout the world billions of dollars in wasted drugs. It will also help speed up patient recovery.

The project began two years ago when University of Canterbury student Andrew Rudge, 25, began searching for a subject for his PhD in mechanical engineering.

His lecturer, Dr Geoff Case, had earlier met with Dr Geoff Shaw, an intensive care specialist at Christchurch Hospital, who had told him about the inherent problems in managing critically ill patients' sedative and pain relief drug dosages.

Shaw told Case that current methods of assessing pain and agitation in patients were very subjective and often resulted in over-sedation.

The two main consequences of this were extended stays in intensive care units and increased drug use — both of which were costly.

Rudge, along with a group of other students, set to work on seeing if automatic detection would be possible, using complex mathematic formulas.

Once he established the science behind the idea was possible, he built a prototype, which involved a sensor that detects what level of agitation a patient is experiencing, using a digital video camera.

His research group is currently perfecting the sensor and the science that measures the amount of drugs that should be administered.

Read more at CNN.com

Not only would this device save money by reducing the amount of wasted medication, but it would hopefully solve the medical establishment's problem of creating narcotic junkies out of people that become addicted to the pain medication as a result of over-dosing. Maybe drug-seekers would think twice of calling an emergency ambulance at 2 in the morning to give them a taxi ride to the Emergency Department for their "hit," if this computer determined that they were in no more acute pain than me after lifting and carrying them, and thus denied them their narcotic fix. One can only hope.

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