Page 168 - Control Theory in Biomedical Engineering

CHAPTER 7

Medical robotics

Olfa Boubaker
University of Carthage, National Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology, Tunis, Tunisia

1 Introduction

Medical robots are robotic machines utilized in health sciences. They can be
categorized into three main classes (Cianchetti et al., 2018): (1) medical
devices including surgery robotic devices, diagnosis and drug delivery
devices, (2) assistive robotics including wearable robots and rehabilitation
devices, and (3) robots mimicking the human body including prostheses,
artificial organs, and body-part simulators. A variety of other classification
approaches for medical robotics are proposed in the vast literature and will
be discussed in this work (Taylor, 1997; Cleary and Nguyen, 2001; Hock-
stein et al., 2007; Dogangil et al., 2010; Enayati et al., 2016; Yang et al.,
2017a; George Thuruthel et al., 2018).
During the last three decades, medical robots have been increasingly used
to perform a growing number of health tasks. As such, they show promising
future potential for use in a wide range of health issues (Preising et al., 1991;
Dario et al., 1996; Speich and Rosen, 2008; Okamura et al., 2010; Bogue,
2011; Ferrigno et al., 2011; Kramme et al., 2011; Troccaz, 2013; Schwei-
kard and Ernst, 2015; Cianchetti et al., 2018).
In the late 1980s, the first commercial surgical robots were built
(Hockstein et al., 2007) and the first commercial myoelectric prostheses
were being used in rehabilitation centers around the word (Zuo and Olson,
2014). The first prototypes date back several decades. Although the history
of medical robotics is short, a review of the literature shows a comprehensive
bibliography revealing the wealth and maturity of the domain.
Compared to manual machines in healthcare, medical robotic systems
offer a wide range of advantages. They are flexible and can be programmed
to perform a number of tasks. They are more versatile and cost effective.
Further, they can eliminate human fatigue as well as improve the precision
and capabilities of physicians. In order to design medical robots, a funda-
mental knowledge of biological systems is needed because these machines
should be more accurate than other robotic systems and should contain

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