Area of Impact: Health

3. In many hospitals around the world, surgeons are performing surgery with the assistances of robots. Robot surgery has been taken a step further with surgeons being able to use remote-controlled robots to perform surgery on patients thousands of miles away.

a. Identify one input and one output device using in robotic surgery.

One input device is a joy stick which would control the knife in surgery. One output device is the monitor in which the doctor is watching the surgery take place on so he knows where to move the tools.

b. Describe one capability and one limitation of Robot when used in surgery.

One capability of this sort of robotic sugary is that the doctor could be out of the country or the patent could get a specialist to do the work, this would save the patient money because they no longer have to travel out of the country for the work. ONe limitation to this sort of persedure is that the robot can not be nearly as persice as a human, and if something was to go wrong with the technology, then the patient will be in danger because the doctor is not there to finish the surgery

d. Discuss one economic concern, one reliability concern and one other concern patients under going robotic surgery. Evaluate the significance of these concerns.

There are many concerns for this type of surgery. When discuss the economics behind the surgery it really matters if the surgeon being used is out of the country and there is no one else who could perform the surgery then it would be cheaper rather to have to travel. If it is such an important surgery like heart surgery then most likely doctors will not recommend flights back afterwards. This will increase the cost. In this case it would appear to be more beneficial to use to robotic surgery so the recovery could be in the comforts of home. Both cases the cost would be more but it would seem that traveling would increase the cost even more.

There are much more reliability concerns, money is something that can be earned and fixed, but if something goes wrong in surgery the patient could easily die. There are more smaller concerns as well. Being a doctor, they must have great control of their hands and not miss place the knife and accidently cut a vein, or tendon. also the input device being a joy stick, does not have nearly the control of hands. this effects the reliably because it seems that these sort of surgeries would not be as reliable as with a doctor.

Another concern would also be even with all of the protection and security, the transfer of information from the doctor to the patient must take place online which means the connection could be lost or someone could hack into maliciously. and potentially kill the patient. this is a great concern because there are people with great hacking abilities.

With all of these concerns taken into consideration, it seems like there are too many concerns to the benefits. As stated above money can be re-earned, but when someone's life/health/ and well being is on the line then the money should be spent in order to insure a surgery by a doctor doing the work is done.