CITY OF NEWBURGH - He’s not a real boy, but he’s close enough.
He blinks. His head and neck move. He cries tears.
A robot manikin named “Hal,” SUNY Orange’s newest simulator, imitates a 5-year-old boy in numerous medical scenarios. One minute he could be having a seizure, and nurses-in-training would have to treat him, and the next his face could turn blue from lack of oxygen, requiring a tracheotomy.
As Edna Aboagye, 25, a nursing student at SUNY Orange’s Newburgh campus, pricked Hal’s finger to draw “blood” for a glucose test, Hal’s head turned toward her, and his big eyes blinked at her, closing slightly as if to shield himself from the pain of the needle.
“I feel like that’s what a kid would really do,” said Aboagye, of the Town of Newburgh.
Bought for about $67,000 from the SUNY Orange Foundation, an organization that accepts donations from the community and can receive funds matched by the state, Hal has a two-year warranty and multiple computers hooked up to him to allow him to operate.
Hal fills the educational gaps for the about 140 students at the college’s Middletown and Newburgh campuses.
Declining availability for pediatric clinical sites in the area has posed a challenge for the program, said Jean Halpern, simulation coordinator for the college. The school’s nursing program only works now with Montefiore St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital, and with the volume of students, not all may be able to work as often one-on-one with real-life patients.
Hal serves as an alternative pediatric experience for students. And there’s only one other robot like him in the tri-state area, located in New York City, according to the college.
Hal came programmed to perform scenarios, but some were programmed after he arrived, Halpern said.
“There are a lot of different things that can happen in a scenario,” Halpern said.
Nursing student Giuliana Fedele, 21, of Central Valley, used Hal for the first time Tuesday with Aboagye and Sara Rattigan, 26, of Stormville. All three ran through a simulation Wednesday morning in which they had to rule out a meningitis diagnosis for Hal.
Some of them guessed he might have had bronchitis, or asthma, or pneumonia, due to fluid build-up in his lungs when they listened to his chest with a stethoscope.
“(Simulation) is a great way to do this without real-life repercussions,” Aboagye said. “You get to make that mistake and somebody tells you this is what you should have done, otherwise, in the real world, the outcome would have been different.”
rettlinger@th-record.com