Modern surgeons can do amazing things to repair a body, but they still have a couple of drawbacks. First, there aren't enough of them, and the skilled surgeons we have aren't distributed equally around the world. Second, they still have human-sized hands and fingers. Very tiny, precise surgical repairs are the province of highly-trained microsurgeons -and robots.
Sony introduced their new Microsurgery Assistance Robot at the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Robotics and Automation. It can be controlled by a trained microsurgeon from a distance, but since it has a microscope for viewing and scaled-up controls, it can be used by surgeons who are not specialists in microsurgery. Imagine being able to fix tiny holes in delicate blood vessels, inside a body where the problem is not exposed by a large incision. In this demonstration video, the robot uses various instruments to cut and then stitch up that cut on a single kernel of corn. We hope the ear is recovering nicely. -via Laughing Squid
As someone who does quite a bit of remote work. One must consider the time-lag. Even the best remote applications have 300 ms lags. It is one thing if every keyboard stroke takes longer than the blink of an eye. Quite another if every cut and suture has that delay.
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