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In 2001, a doctor in New York completed what may seem like a routine surgery to remove a patient’s gallbladder. But in fact that procedure wasn’t routine at all, because the patient was in France. That was the first successful long-distance robotic surgery, or telesurgery, ever performed, and since then the field has taken off. Though robotic surgery is not yet the industry standard, sales of medical robots are increasing by 20 percent each year, and by 2025 the Department of Defense wants to have deployable Trauma Pods ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4wjAlprgBc ) that could allow surgeons to operate on soldiers from hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Though proponents of telesurgery have thoroughly discussed its benefits (there's no delay due to travel time, for example, and surgery could be possible in remote locations like deep underwater or in outer space) there hasn’t been much exploration of its weaknesses. Researchers from the University of Washington decided to put the telesurgery technology to the test to see if they are susceptible to cyber attacks. According their study, the security of surgical robots leaves much to be desired. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04339 )
http://www.popsci.com/robots-used-surgery-can-be-easily-hacked
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @08:33PM
Good for business, bad for people. Soon enough someone will rent these out with payments required for each period, or the machine would lock up. This will also reduce the number of surgeons needed. And surgeons are expensive (for good reasons).
Then later these will (of course) need to be controlled by a central controller, which will conveniently botch surgeries for "some" people. Of course, there will be network intrusions, but for the first hundreds/thousands of surgeries nothing bad will happen. Then when people have become comfortable with the technology and have started depending on it, the vile group in control will rear its ugly head.