Building robots to support healthcare workers and patients
The medical robotics collaboratory covers research across two broad categories. One category involves mechatronic design, control, and autonomy of robot systems for clinical use, such as minimally invasive surgery and imaged guided interventions. A second category involves the broader healthcare objectives of empowering individuals with high quality of life beyond an operating room, from hospitals, to rehabilitation facilities, to assisted living at home. In both categories, the collabloratory co-develops new technologies with close interaction with the patients, the medical experts, and the staff that help them. Understanding human factors is fundamental to the systems design and the overall research agenda. The medical robotics collaboratory covers research on all of these aspects of human-computer interaction, mechanism design, image guidance and feedback control, systems integration, and clinical demonstration.