It’s a long-standing challenge for first responders: Opening the airways of critically injured patients struggling to breathe often takes multiple attempts, costing crucial seconds.

The problem caught David Haggerty’s attention when he was a graduate student, and he set out to see if he could make the rescue procedure, called intubation, easier. In a paper published Wednesday , Haggerty and a research team led by the University of California, Santa Barbara, described a robotic device they say has the potential to be faster and more reliable.

Midway through the project, the work became unexpectedly personal for Haggerty when his cousin died in a motorcycle accident. In an interview with STAT, he said he couldn’t shake the feeling that things might have turned out differently if airway m

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