Reproducing difficulties of airway management on patients with restricted mouth opening using the WKA-1

Airway management is provided by emergency medical technicians or anesthetists in order to save unconscious patients under emergency situations. Even though airway management is basic skill, there may be some difficulties while performing airway management to patients with abnormalities. Therefore, it is important to train medical students to perform such a task on patients with abnormalities. Recently, many companies are developing airway training mannequins designed to reproduce the conditions of the airway management procedure. However, such training devices cannot provide any quantitative information of the training progress so that few amount of feedback can be provided to trainees. For this purpose, we have proposed the development of an airway management training system which has been designed to embed sensors into a conventional mannequin. As a result, we have developed the Waseda-Kyotokagaku Airway No. 1 (WKA-1). In this paper, the WKA-1 was used to reproduce the airway management on patients with abnormalities on jaw opening. For this purpose, we have added an array of springs to simulate those abnormalities. Then, we proposed an experiment to detect the differences on performances among doctors (anesthetist) while performing the airway management in patients with and without abnormalities on the jaw opening. Both cases were analyzed quantitatively by using the functionalities of the WKA-1. From the experimental results, we could find a statistically significant difference between both cases.