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Wearable Robotic System Gives Surgeons Ability to 'Sense' and 'See'

A team of researchers led by the University of the West of England are developing a wearable robotic system for minimally invasive surgery that will offer surgeons dexterous movement as well as the ability to 'sense', 'see', and safely navigate through the surgical environment. Called SMARTsurg (SMart WearAble Robotic Teleoperated surgery), three key pieces of hardware will be the starting points in developing the new surgical robotic system. Exoskeletons will fit over the surgeon's hands, which will control the instruments inside the body - a newly developed surgical 'gripper' which mimics the thumb and two fingers of the hand. The instrument, which goes inside the body, will have haptic abilities, allowing the surgeon to 'feel' the tissues and organs inside the body. In addition, smart glasses will enable the surgeon to have a realistic view of what is taking place inside the body while using the advanced robotic tools developed.

Topics:
Automation Medical Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [Music] robotic surgery has been a fantastic Health Innovation over the last 8 years or so we've done over 3,000 cases the system we've got to date has served us well the first generation of these robots they're coming to the end of their natural lifespan now they are very expensive to replace that's one problem uh but secondly there isn't as much

    00:00:36 flexibility that we as surgeons want this new big collaboration is aimed at establishing a costeffective means but a more flexible approach to doing surgery with the robot we want to make instruments that perhaps look like a human hand so that then the surgeon will not have to spare um a lot of training time on using them but instead it will be like they have superhuman Powers

    00:01:03 let's say superum abilities in such a way to feel that their own hands are inside the patient's abdomen the surgeon wears these data gloves these two rigid exoskeletons that we are developing in the lab so when surgeons move their fingers and while wearing this exoskeleton the motion of of the fingers is being picked up by that and is being tracked and then sent uh to the computer

    00:01:27 and then processed and sent finally to the instruments so that the instruments are imitating the fingers of the surgeon ultimate aim is to promote minimal invasive surgery in surgeries where when it is not available at the moment so we want to look at the problems surgeons have an open axis surgery and see how we can develop new new generation of instruments that allows minimal invasive

    00:01:54 replacement for Open Access surgeries I think surgeons will embrace the new technology if it's properly developed and evaluated and it's shown to be an improvement on existing systems which it purports to be in the way the study has been set up [Music]