Non-invasive positive pressure ventilation has attracted increasing attention for air management in general anesthesia. This work proposes a novel robot equipped with two snake arms and a mask-fastening mechanism to facilitate trachea airway management for anesthesia as well as deep sedation and to improve surgical outcomes. The two snake arms with supporting terminals have been designed to lift a patient's jaw with design optimization, and the mask-fastening mechanism has been utilized to fasten the mask onto a patient's face. The control unit has been developed to implement lifting and fastening force control with safety and robustness. Loading experiments on the snake arm and tension experiments on the mask-fastening mechanism have been performed to investigate and validate the performances of the proposed anesthesia airway management robot. Experiments on a mock person have also been employed to further verify the effectiveness and reliability of the developed robot system. As an early study of an anesthesia airway management robot, it was verified as a valid attempt to perform mask non-invasive positive pressure ventilation technology by taking advantage of a robotic system.
Keywords: general anesthesia; medical robot; positive pressure ventilation.