When you go under the scalpel for the first time you often think about what comes after the surgery as much as you do the actual operation. Thanks to a new line of robots you may not have to worry about your doctor making a mistake on that final step. This is all thanks to an unmanned robot who was used to stitch up a pig’s bowel after an operation, moving us t hat little bit closer to getting automated assistance during surgery.
The robot, the Star robot, is completely self-controlled, meaning that unlike previous attempts to use robots to help refine a doctors movements, the Star robot was able to perform the entire stitching process without any human interaction.
While not a new action to use robots to help assist in surgery, the aim for the next generation of robots is to perform acts like stitching up a patient to remove any human error that could lead patients to nasty looking scars. While looking to be automated, the team behind the operation insist that while robots are suited for repetitive, predictable work such as stitching a medical team would always be there for help intervene should they be required to do so.
In the trail, those involved had to tweak the robots operations around 40% of the time, with “minor adjustments” being corrected in the first tries. Worried about ethics and trust, the doctors hope that this could be the first step to helping doctors deal with the swarm of repeated and common issues they have to perform in tired and emotional states on a daily basis.
I can just imagine the new craze for stitched wounds https://goo.gl/3jzYl1