SOPHIE

Surgeon’s Operating Force-feedback Interface Eindhoven
The brainchild of researcher Linda van den Bedem as part of her PhD, and the first surgical robot to have tactile feedback, is revolutionary. [[|1]]. This new compact surgical robot that also incorporates force feedback, which allows the surgeon to get a tactile feedback on what the robot is doing. Prior to SOFIE, surgical robots had the limitation of being large and clumsy and lacked the ability to give a surgeon any sort of tactile feedback on how much force the robot is exerting on the patient. Obviously, for delicate operations and for such things as suturing, this was a major drawback, as there was no way to know if excess force was being applied. While this is clearly an impressive benefit, the more important part, is the way SOFIE was designed.

SOFIE has two units, the slave and the master unit; the master unit is what the surgeon interacts with while the slave unit is the unit that performs the actual operations. The small size of the slave unit allows it to be mounted upon the operating table, which allows for greater flexibility and use; the robot does not need to be reset every time the patient or operating table is moved [ [|2] ]. The way the slave station is organized, is that the operator is free to pick and choose, to decide how exactly they would like to approach an organ, while also still receiving tactile feedback [ [|3] ]. Additionally, the smaller statue of the slave unit reduces the amount of space taken up by the system, freeing up room and helping with extremely crowded operating theaters  With the flexibility offered by this system, an organ can easily be approached from differing angles, intricate tilting movements can be carried out on the fly, and the robot does not have to be reprogrammed to understand where exactly it is, unlike other floor mounted systems. This is a great leap forward in terms of giving these surgical robots a vast amount of new flexibility as well as opening up procedures that were impossible in the past, while still being cheaper then previous generations of surgical robots.

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