Research

It’s new, but it’s also a natural progression, if you think about the field, which is very multi-disciplinary. My undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering, my graduate studies were in biomedical engineering and my post doc was electrical engineering. I moved across the engineering landscape. This is, in a sense, the story of robotics. There is no one sub-discipline in engineering that can claim it.

It was hard to get me to accept it. It was very suspicious. My colleague at the University of Washington, Blake Hannaford, came up with the idea: Let’s write a grant, duplicate the system, and give it to our “vicious enemies” (laughs) for free. The only reason I agreed to do it is that he had proved me wrong several times. And he was right.

There’s an honest effort to work together towards the common goal. Everyone can access the smallest screw to change and modify the system. On a more serious note, Raven itself was originally developed because industry wouldn’t allow academics full access to surgical robotics, and we didn’t want to hold the research back by adopting that approach.

They are impressive. We’re working with Harvard and Johns Hopkins, UCLA, UC Berkeley, University of Nebraska and the University of Washington. I feel that we’re taking the right stance. There are so many aspects of surgical robotics that a single researcher, and even multiple institutions, can’t address. Things get very intense and very complicated when you’re actually using the technology in the field.

Robert Auman, an Israeli mathematician, won a Nobel prize in economics for his work on game theory. Basically, he discovered that collaboration isn’t necessarily effective if it’s a one-shot deal. But if a game is played multiple times, collaboration yields better results. I began to feel that collaboration is at the foundation of our existence. We used to collaborate to survive; now we have the luxury to choose whether we want to collaborate. But the benefits can be significant, across the board. For example, if two competing companies collaborate, they actually increase their revenue.

I found the confluence of engineering and medicine interesting. Most people were shying away from it because it’s a very elaborate and time-consuming process. These are two cultures and we don’t even speak the same language. They try to intimidate us with anatomical terms in Latin and you try to intimidate them with equations.

It takes time. Once they learn our language and they learn about ours, things get better. A lot of it is setting expectations. Surgeons in particular are very hands-on. They want their tool to be in their hands tomorrow. Yesterday, actually. But as one of my colleagues put it, medicine is a problem-rich environment, and engineering is a solution-rich discipline.

I’m interested in collaborative surgery: two surgeons, two sets of arms. They could be next to each other, or in remote places, but either way, surgery would be accelerated. One of them could be a machine, so it would be a human collaborating with an algorithm. The U.S. military has a vision that 15 to 20 years from now, the entire military will be robotic. This includes medical services. So there will be movement in that direction.

An exoskeleton is a device that you wear, like clothes. It’s supposed to interact with you physically, co-exist with you. It can amplify your strength, even if you’re healthy. For example, it can help you carry heavier loads. We sometimes call it a haptic device. Haptics in Greek is a sense of touch. 

I can put you in a virtual reality, and map the motion you make into an avatar. With most virtual reality set-ups, if you reach toward a ball, you can see the hand reaching the ball, and it might even penetrate the ball, but you don’t feel anything. Our exoskeleton stops once your reach the ball. You would not penetrate it, and you would feel it. You can move around in a virtual physical world and feel the force feedback.

It’s neurological. The whole idea of treating these people is based on the brain’s plasticity. We have more neurons than we actually need, and if one part of the brain is damaged, other parts can take over and recover some of the motor control. But it takes time.

Insurance companies expect stroke victims to relearn in three months what took them 20 years to learn in the first place. It’s almost impossible. But you can amplify the learning. Now the learning is limited by how much time stroke victims have with a physical therapist, but people can tolerate far more therapy. That’s where the exoskeleton comes in.

No. But it will allow therapists to treat more patients at the same time and offer patients the opportunity to do more therapy. We’re not removing people from the scene. What we’re planning to do is make it patient-centered, rather than therapist-centered.

Gravity is a very strong force on our body. About 95 percent of the energy we use goes to keeping our body in a certain posture, and only 5 percent to move in a certain direction. Some of these patients lose a lot of muscle control. This exoskeleton’s actuators, electrical motors, compensate for the gravitational load, and also for the patient’s weight. They feel as if they are in space. So they can concentrate on the motion itself.

That approach consists of connecting electrodes directly to the brain. There is a fundamental problem with it. The brain doesn’t like that you’re inserting electrodes in it, so it develops tissue that will isolate it from the electrodes. After three months, the brain will fully encapsulate the electrodes. Unless there’s a breakthrough in biocompatibility, the technology is viable but very short-lived.

With a stroke, the recovery continues indefinitely. You take someone in, you treat them for a while, you build the neurological connections, and you set them free. We looked at people 10 years past a stroke and the brain is still demonstrating the ability to recover. We think of our system as a “gym for the brain.” It’s a physical activity that’s changing neurological set-ups.

We’re trying to make it commercially available through a company I founded called Exosense.

Typically you find robotics distributed among many departments in engineering. Richard Hughey, who’s now the dean of undergraduate studies, decided to invest in robotics, and Santa Cruz offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees in robotics. The university is unusual in offering that degree for undergraduates. 

That’s possible. I used to play violin, and row competitively. 

We were actually pretty good. We competed internationally, in three world championships. But it was 25 years ago. I’m still rowing, only now it’s in a reservoir a few miles from here.