The times they are a changing. The other day, I stumbled across the Clinical Robotics Law Journal, after being intrigued by a February 20, 2019 article titled: The Healing Touch: Haptic Feedback and the State-of-the-Art Defense. Lots of other interesting article titles too, but I resisted the temptation for all but the one. As a teaser, here’s a paragraph from the article:
“Today, private companies and institutions like UCLA are developing technologies that will one day give surgeons the ability to not only see but also feel during robotic surgeries. One such technology accomplishes this “through [a] sensor that, when placed on the tips of surgical instruments, would provide feedback [in the form of vibrations, forces and buzzes] on the various forces exerted on body tissues to better guide surgery.” Given the numerous obvious benefits of physicians feeling the tissue on which they operate, it’s not a stretch of the imagination to assume that in the not too distant future, haptic feedback will be considered a state-of-the-art function in surgical robots.