Robotics in Medicine

Publisher Summary

This chapter reports the current state of the art in medical robotics. Rather than trying to enumerate all the possible applications of robots or robotic technologies to medicine, three general areas of advanced robotics are identified, which, based on the current technological background and expertise, could potentially provide significant improvements to the state of the art in medicine. These are: macrorobotics, microrobotics, and biorobotics. Macrorobotics includes the development of robots, wheelchairs, manipulators for rehabilitation as well as new, more powerful tools and techniques for surgery; microrobotics could greatly contribute to the field of minimally invasive surgery as well as to the development of a new generation of miniaturized mechatronic tools for conventional surgery; biorobotics deals with the problems of modeling and simulating biological systems to provide a better understanding of human physiology. According to this classification, a review on the most important past and ongoing research projects in the field is reported. Some commercial products already on the market are also mentioned and a brief analysis of the economical potentialities of robotics in medicine that can be prefigured in the near future is presented.