It's amazing to me that a robot that can do surgery on human beings is not advanced enough. That sounds extremely advanced to me. In the medical world, technology changes very quickly (every 3-4 years) so when it doesn't change doctors are surprised. They expect there to be new medicines and products available to them. Robot surgeons seem to be one area when the biomedical engineers are lacking on
Thursday, March 25, 2010
The Advancement of the Robot Surgeon
I learned from the article "The Slow Rise of Robot Surgeon" by Emily Singer that doctors are not satisfied with the evolution of robots used for surgery. The main issue is that only one company makes the robot (called the da Vinci robot) so there is no competition from other companies. This allows the company to price the robot very high since they're the only company producing the robots. It costs hospitals $2.5 million to buy this robot in order to make their procedures less invasive. The robot also allows for less surgery and recovery time. The point is that doctors are not happy that this is the only robot out there. They want other companies to start building cheaper and better robots.
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Its sad that technology is sometimes needed faster than it can be produced by humans. Its is disheartening that hospitals may not have the most effective surgerical tools because they simply cant afford them. It seems that market competition hasn't benefited the hospital system which deserves it the most since they are saving lives everyday. I definitely agree that biomedical engineers have a lot of work to do.
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