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, @12:59PM
cool stuff, until the hackers break the link between the 5 star michelling chef cooking in my kitchen via telerobotic link ; )