JB 2021-04-02

Robotics Business Stories ThoughtWorthSharing

In 2019, a surgeon in India has successfully performed the first remote heart surgery on a patient who was lying on an operating table 20 miles away. Telemedicine has largely been heralded as an inexpensive alternative to traditional forms of medicine, and has gained popularity in recent decades. In 2017, 76 percent of U.S. hospitals had implemented some form of remote medicine, according to the American Hospital Association.

In the past several decades, doctors have begun to rely on robots more. The first robot-assisted surgery was performed in 1985, when neurosurgeons used robotic technology to provide more precise brain biopsies.

“Soft Robotics”

Very interesting development of course, but it’s not as easy as it may sound. If you pick up a glass of wine, you do that much different compared to you grabbing your cup of tea. It’s also about the objects texture, weight, fragility, etc. You can imagine that the texture and strength of your skin compared to a blood vessel, a muscle or a nerve is completely different. A lot of learning is involved, where many people around the world are contributing by means of scientific investigations, called ‘soft robotics’ or ‘telerobotics’. For example Irene Kuling, an Assistant Professor in the group Dynamics & Control at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), have published an article about “Toward Enhanced Teleoperation Through Embodiment”. Telerobotics aims to transfer human manipulation skills and dexterity over an arbitrary distance and at an arbitrary scale to a remote workplace.

Robotics during pandemic

In Nature there was a very interesting article published about “The rise of robots in surgical environments during COVID-19”, in which detailed scenarios in the pre-, intra- and postoperative care were outlined. They concluded that “AI and robotic technology can be utilized to face this challenge of avoiding COVID-19 or other pathogen spread during surgeries.” But also “outside the operating room, these technologies can be implemented for various tasks such as digitized patient admission, effective triaging during times of high demand, acquisition and monitoring of vital signs, identification of high-risk nodes, sterilization with real-time contamination feedback, drawing of blood and delivery of food and drugs.”

While robot-assisted surgery can reduce contamination risk, contactless remote robotic surgery would be the ideal scenario to prevent pathogen spread as it technically can be conducted with only the presence of the patient in the operating room. This visionary setting would allow continuing surgery during pandemics without risking increased contamination. Beyond the pandemic, use of these technologies in surgical environments can provide other benefits to improve safety and efficiency for the patient and to serve rural areas more effectively through remote surgery.