Swinburne University researchers in Hawthorn develop pain relieving robot

Swinburne University researchers say they have revolutionised the treatment of soft tissue injuries after creating a robot that delivers a targeted laser directly to the source of the pain.

Robots could revolutionise the treatment of soft tissue injuries by targeting the exact cause of the patients’ pain, researchers say.

In a technological leap evocative of a sci-fi film, Swinburne University Hawthorn lecturer Dr Mats Isaksson said specialised robots developed by his team could soon be common place in hospitals and doctor’s surgeries due to their efficiency and low cost.

“What we are trying to do is make a previously used pain treatment automatic, we are not inventing the treatment. Before a patient would have gone into one room to get a thermal camera picture, the therapist would check that picture and then go to the patient applying treatment with a laser in his hand,” Dr Isaksson said.

“(Our robot) can both measure with the thermal camera and treat with the laser. Combining this with smart software opens up a lot of possibilities to provide individually targeted treatment.”

Like the technology used in cricket which shows if the ball has made contact with the bat, the thermal camera scans the patient’s body to identify hot spots of inflammation, he said.

This information was fed to the robot, which then delivered a low-level infra-red laser directly to the patient’s injury to relieve pain.

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Swinburne has developed a fully working prototype, and Dr Isaksson said their robot’s affordable price tag, which came in at less than $50,000, made it cheap in terms of medical equipment.

“There are 70,000 clinics in Australia alone that provide a variety of massage therapies for aches and pains of necks, backs, hamstrings, fibromyalgia, (and) chronic pain syndromes, so there are many places our solution could be useful,” he said.

“In addition, the system can measure the result after the treatment and use the before and after pictures to make changes in the treatment opening up for much more individual treatment.”