Dartmouth College is hoping to spare fragile student brains from concussions that too often happen during football games. The first step, and possibly the most important, is getting players with suspected injury out of the game as soon as possible. There are some basic tests that staff can perform on the sidelines that may point to concussion, but Dartmouth is using a telemedicine robot from VGo to virtually bring clinicians to the sidelines.
The pilot project, conducted by the Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Center for Telehealth, is running during all of Dartmouth’s at-home football games, with clinicians on-call at a nearby hospital ready at any moment to take control of the VGo robot to assess injured players and guide them through a battery of tests.
The college hopes that this technology will prove to be useful and hopes to have it readily available for football, as well as for other contact sports played by the students.
Product page: VGo…