Page 177 - Control Theory in Biomedical Engineering

162 Control theory in biomedical engineering

– The actuation strategy (Cianchetti et al., 2018; Runciman et al., 2019;
Gifari et al., 2019; Le et al., 2016).
– The force sensing and its application in MIS and therapy (Trejos
et al., 2010).
– The haptics technologies (Enayati et al., 2016).
– The level of autonomy (Payne and Yang, 2014; Yang et al., 2017a).
– The control strategies (George Thuruthel et al., 2018; Chikhaoui and
Burgner-Kahrs, 2018).
– The possible applications of participatory and opportunistic mobile
sensing (Daneshmand et al., 2017).
– The variable stiffness and the locomotion and sensing methods
(Runciman et al., 2019; Gifari et al., 2019).

4 Advantages and fundamental requirements

To date, fields such as surgical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, and assistive
robotics have been generally considered as separate fields in spite of the fact
that they offer the same advantages and need the same requirements.
We highlight these items in the sections that follow.

4.1 Advantages
Despite their high cost and limitations in haptic sensing and judgment in
complex situations, medical robots have to supply measurable and comple-
mentary abilities compared to those of human ones to be accepted and
extensively used in healthcare applications (Taylor et al., 2008). Due to their
accuracy, repeatability, and indefatigability, robotic technology is increas-
ingly affecting the entire healthcare sector through advances in diagnosis,
preoperative planning, surgery, postoperative evaluation, acute rehabilita-
tion, and chronic assistive devices. Particularly, medical robots have proved
their abilities in (Taylor, 1997; Yang et al., 2017a):
– improving doctor’s technical qualifications characterized by lack of pre-
cision, fatigue, tremor, and inattention either by making existing proce-
dures more accurate, faster, or less invasive;
– making it possible to perform infeasible interventions by humans in haz-
ardous environments;
– advancing surgical safety by enhancing technical performance of difficult
procedures in dangerous proximity to delicate anatomical structures
by using online monitoring and information supports for surgical
procedures;