Development of the airway management training system WKA-1 designed to embed arrays of sensors into a conventional mannequin

Airway management is provided by emergency medical technicians or anesthetists in order to save unconscious patients who are unable to breathe. Even though it is a basic technique, many accidents may occur when the procedure is not provided followed. In order to avoid any risks to patients, emergency medical technicians are required to practice airway management using training devices such as mannequins; which are designed to accurately reproduce the human anatomy. However, such training devices do not provide any quantitative information about the learning progress of trainees (passive training). For that purpose, we have proposed the development of a airway management training system which is designed to embed array of sensors so that quantitative information of trainees' performance can be acquired. In this paper, we are presenting the Waseda-KyotoKagaku airway No. 1 (WKA-1). The WKA-1 consists of three different kinds of array of sensors which are embedded into a conventional mannequin. In order to embed the array of sensors, we have simplified the design of some of the simulated organs (upper airway, oral cavity, tongue and teeth) of the mannequin. A set of evaluation parameters were proposed based on the information collected through the sensors. A set of experiments were proposed to experimentally verify the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation parameters to quantitatively detect differences among different levels of skills (anesthetists and unskilled persons).