Medical robots are highly talented machines. They can help diagnose diseases by working inside a patient's body. They can mix up the right compounds for chemotherapy, and they can serve as remote avatars for patients' relatives and doctors. Some of them are helping paralyzed people walk. Others are teaching stroke victims to move their arms and legs again.
Other medical robots are helping surgeons perform a wide variety of tasks, from brain surgery and heart surgery to less invasive procedures such as knee resurfacing.
Click on the image below to see 11 robots making breakthroughs in the medical industry.
MAKO Surgical's RIO Robotic Arm Interactive Orthopedic System is designed to help surgeons during knee resurfacing, a minimally invasive but difficult operation done before placing implants, an alternative to more extensive and invasive total knee replacement. Knee resurfacing retains healthy bone and tissue, preserves the ligaments, and speeds recovery time. The RIO Robotic Arm provides real-time, interoperative visual, tactile, and auditory feedback, fostering more precise positioning of implants. (Source: MAKO Surgical)
Tools, tools, tools. The use of robots, using highly engineered and very small tools, allow the surgeon to do his work with very tiny incisions. They are not meant (at least in the current iterations) to replace the human doctor, the human thinker, or the human controller. What these surgical robots do best is work very precisely in a very confined space. Even the most skilled surgeon is limited by the size of his hands and fingers.
It is interesting to see the comments here & to see just how far we've come in developing robotic medical assistants.
Farm (http://www.farmpd.com) has worked on a few of the technologies highlighted here (Mako Surgical & Corindus)! These technolgies are improving patient outcomes by reducing procedure time while increasing surgical accuracy and precision. We attribute these developments to an increased awareness and focus on human factors engineering and usability!
The exoskeleton is an idea whose time has come. Although the one pictured here weighs 84 lbs, I could imagine it weighing one-fourth of that in ten years.
Lou, I'm with you--the idea of autonomous robots operating on oneself is very creepy indeed. Personally, I'm glad we're not yet at the stage of the Star Wars medibots.
Ann, the idea of robots operating on one is somewhat creepy. On the other hand, they can be very consistent and accurate. If you have a good surgeon who makes you feel comfortable, then it is nice. This is not always the case, though.
It looks like we are moving toward the medibots from Star Wars. That will be interesting.
Ann, yes you are right. Now a day's in super specialty hospitals robots are using in surgical rooms for assisting doctors for carrying out surgery and pre-post operative procedures. But one thing we have to remember is all the operations of such robotics are pre programmed one and they have no logical or analytical thinking like human brains.
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