TELEROBOTICS IN MEDICINE AND SURGERY

The application of telerobotic technologies to medicine and surgery st rictly depends on research and development in five main areas: functio nality, environment, physical constraints, communication, and security . The clinical application of robotic technology in the field of micro surgery, orthopaedic surgery, and minimally invasive surgery has shown promising results, pushing researchers to further develop computer-ai ded surgery as well as diagnostics systems and microrobots. Telemanipu lation, interface technologies, sensors, vision systems, virtual reali ty and function integration are employed to re-design the operating th eatre, thus enhancing future applications of robotics in surgery. Beca use of the restrictions in the surgical field, the construction of min iaturized mechanisms is required, being grounded on different technolo gies: silicon micromechanics, surface micro-engineering and LIGA techn ology. Nanotechnology, memory alloys and superelastic materials are al so employed. Other technological issues are: the communication of voca l, visual, textual and numerical information via cable, satellite or l aser satellite transmission. Security and confidentiality of data are fundamental for telematics applied to medicine. Problems to be solved are the quality of image transmission and the signal delay as well as those related to working in a dynamic environment.