Medical robotics

Information and communication technology (ICT) and mechatronics play a basic role in medical robotics and computer-aided therapy. In the last three decades, in fact, ICT technology has strongly entered the health-care field, bringing in new techniques to support therapy and rehabilitation. In this frame, medical robotics is an expansion of the service and professional robotics as well as other technologies, as surgical navigation has been introduced especially in minimally invasive surgery. Localization systems also provide treatments in radiotherapy and radiosurgery with high precision. Virtual or augmented reality plays a role for both surgical training and planning and for safe rehabilitation in the first stage of the recovery from neurological diseases. Also, in the chronic phase of motor diseases, robotics helps with special assistive devices and prostheses. Although, in the past, the actual need and advantage of navigation, localization, and robotics in surgery and therapy has been in doubt, today, the availability of better hardware (e.g., microrobots) and more sophisticated algorithms(e.g., machine learning and other cognitive approaches)has largely increased the field of applications of these technologies,making it more likely that, in the near future, their presence will be dramatically increased, taking advantage of the generational change of the end users and the increasing request of quality in health-care delivery and management.