The training robots that are saving lives

At Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital, New South Wales, the EdWise team run training simulations to help medical staff understand how to respond to emergency situations. We get up close and personal with the uncanny valley.

When you're dealing with a life-or-death situation, sometimes it's best not to practice on a live patient. The EdWise program run out of Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital uses what it calls patient simulators (not actually robots) to walk medical-staff-in-training through a variety of emergency situations.

They're like the stuff of nightmares — staring into space out of rubbery faces, while their chests rise and fall, mouths agape — but they're more than creepy. They're cool. Chris Carpenter, biomedical engineer, talks us through what these babies can do.

Awesome trivia that ended up on the cutting room floor: the EdWise simulators run on Windows. Check out more in the video above.