Humans have long admired the ability of cats to always land on their feet — known as the cat righting reflex. The flexible bodies of our feline friends allow them to twist as they fall. It’s no wonder then, that researchers at Georgia Tech are studying the way cats flex and turn in the air — so they can apply what they learn in designing robots that can land without sustaining damage. The applications are numerous!

Check out more information and check out 15 other cat qualities scientists could study to make better robots (as told by Susan C. Willett) at catster.com

Drone America, an aerospace company, and American Medical Response (AMR), a medical transportation company, have announced a partneship that aims to bring Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UAS) to the EMS industry. By leveraging UAS technologies, AMR’s specialty teams would be able to provide swifter and safer rescue operations in dangerous situations such as disaster response, mountain rescue and swift water rescues.

“We are looking at the various potentials for the use of UAS’s for both the delivery of medical services such as an AED, and as a platform for public safety such as search and rescue operations and communications platforms,” said AMR’s Senior Vice President of Operations Randall Strozyk.

A pre-production model of Drone America’s medical DAx8 UAS was revealed at AMR’s booth during the American Ambulance Association conference in Las Vegas. Recently the AMR DAx8 gave a short flight demonstration inside a North Lake Tahoe Fire Department station for a Channel 8 KOLO News story about drones.

“Drone America’s DAx8 is specifically engineered with emergency services and first responders in mind,” said President and CEO of Drone America Mike Richards.

Check out more information at unmannedsystemstechnology.com

The first robot and networked tablets are making their way today to an Ebola treatment unit in Liberia, where they will give aid workers their first chance at sharing data about the deadly outbreak.

Debbie Theobald, co-founder and executive director of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Vecna Cares left on a flight to Monrovia, Liberia Tuesday night, taking the company’s own CliniPaktablets, a robot and the technology needed to set up a local area wireless network.

For doctors and nurses accustomed to scribbling patient notes on pieces of paper in any of the Ebola Treatment Units (ETU) scattered across West Africa, this will be the first time they’ll have access to portable computers that can share information wirelessly. It also gives them an electronic medical record system to track patients and share treatment and disease information with clinicians in other units and researchers in various countries. This also marks the first time a robot will be working in one of the treatment centers.

“I think that this system is critical to fighting the outbreak,” Theobald told Computerworld. “This is the first time they’ll be using digital records at all in any of the ETUs. Everyone has been using paper. If they have had a tablet, all the information they’re capturing is stuck on that tablet because they haven’t been able to data share across tablets.”

Vecna Cares, a healthcare IT company, will also be bringing the medical records system, minus the robot, to ETUs in Lunsar and Makeni, both towns in Sierra Leone. Depending on how well the VGo robot functions and is accepted in Monrovia, others could be sent to Sierra Leone to aid outbreak efforts there.

Check out more information at computerworld.com

Researchers are working on technology that could be shipped to West Africa to help fight the Ebola outbreak as soon as a few months from now, while also looking ahead to bigger plans to combat any disease outbreak.

“Absolutely. This is something we can do,” said Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University and director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue said Wednesday. “There are lots of things we found that can go right now … but this will continue to motivate research in human-robotic interactions and how to understand how you design a new technology, how you test a new technology, how you factor in cultural context, how to factor in the targeted environments and how you train people to use them, she said.”

Tech researchers from around the U.S. met with health care and aid workers nearly two weeks ago to discuss what kinds of technology, such as robotics, big data analysis or communications, could help fight the Ebola epidemic. Now plans are in the works to get the technological aid where it’s needed. The Nov. 7 workshop was livestreamed across locations at Worcester Polytechnic University, Texas A&M, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the University of California at Berkeley. During the meetings, aid workers were able to explain to the researchers the obstacles they faced in using certain types of technology.

Nothing can be simply shipped to a treatment center in a foreign country however. All proposals from U.S. companies to send technology to areas hit by the Ebola outbreak must go through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which administers civilian foreign aid efforts. USAID has put out a call for proposals, and submissions are due by Dec. 1. Murphy said she’s expecting the agency to quickly act on some of the proposals so that some of the technologies can be shipped to West Africa early in the new year.

While researchers are looking at short-term answers for Ebola, they’re also focused on coming up with bigger, more complex systems that can be ready for outbreaks of other deadly diseases.

For more information, check out computerworld.com

The Australian Rural Fire Service (RFS) is carrying out trials this fire season with “spy in the sky” unmanned aircraft and drones to evaluate their use to monitor fires for extended periods and to provide early data in the first minutes of arriving on the fire ground.

One test is to likely to take placed in the Wollemi National Park near Singleton, should a major fire operation arise. It will use the Scan Eagle Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which can send back both thermal and visual image data and is capable of staying airborne for some 20 hours. Insitu Pacific, the Brisbane operator of the Scan Eagle, believes their use will become almost routine within a year, with a trial contract in place with the Queensland fire and emergency services.

The RFS NSW also has a contract to trial the Octocopter with multiple rotors with a view to it being launched by the first crew to arrive at the scene of a fire to provide information on the extent of the fire front to enable senior crew to determine how fire fighting assets are deployed. Anthony Ferguson, superintendent of aviation co-ordination and planning at RFS NSW, said several projects are looking at their potential usefulness for intelligence gathering around fires.

For more information, check out i-hls.com

The malaria drone mission began in December 2013, when UK scientists decided to track a rare strain of the mosquito-borne disease that has surged near Southeast Asian cities. Understanding deforestation may be the key in seeing how this kind of malaria, known as Plasmodium knowlesi, is transmitted.

The mosquitoes that carry Plasmodium knowlesi are forest dwellers. The insects breed in cool pools of water under the forest canopy and sap blood from macaque monkeys that harbor the malaria parasite. Human cases of this kind of malaria didn’t surface in Malaysia until about 10 years ago, says infectious disease specialist Kimberly Fornace of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is leading the drone study.

As part of a project called MONKEYBAR, the team tracks outbreaks by comparing the drone’s land surveillance with hospital records of malaria cases. Meanwhile, a local wildlife commission has fitted macaques with GPS collars, which let scientists monitor the locations of monkey troops. Together, this information paints a public health map that explains how land development has influenced monkey movements as well as transmission of malaria to humans.

For more information, check out i-hls.com