Coffee with a robot: Robotics demonstration lets locals play Operation at a higher level

Published 5:15 am Thursday, April 12, 2018

It isn’t every day that someone hands you the keys to their million-dollar robot and invites you to put it through its paces. Yet for guests who happened by Karma’s Coffee House Wednesday, getting to play surgeon at the controls of a super-sophisticated piece of medical technology was all just part of the atmosphere.

Representatives for the da Vinci Robotic Surgical System were on hand to guide the curious, as well as a few informed medical professionals, through a demonstration of one of the company’s devices — a multi-component system anchored by a control console and a four-armed, articulating robot.

The tool, which curious coffee shop guests were welcome to sit down at and use, is typically installed in hospital operating rooms as a less invasive alternative to traditional camera-guided surgery. 

Under skilled guidance, it’s a device that allows a surgeon to keep eyes on the patient’s surgical area at all times, and it even corrects some small-scale slip-of-the-hand errors.

Da Vinci representative Tanner Hillis said Wednesday’s demonstration allows people to get a better understanding of how robotics can help patients undertake fewer surgical risks, have shorter hospital stays, and experience faster recoveries.

“We just wanted to bring this resource to the Cullman area and do an event for general public information, to show this as one of the different modalities that are out there for surgery,” said Hillis. “It’s a great opportunity to introduce the robot and educate the community on how this can be used to perform more minimally invasive procedures.”

Da Vinci partnered with Brookwood Health to bring the demonstration to Cullman, hosting an evening informational session that attracted the interest of local high school students, as well as a small handful of local people who work in the medical field.

The engineering behind the device helps translate gross human gestures into much finer motions for small surgical areas, all at a consistent ratio. When a person sits down at an imaging monitor that offers a zoomed-in, high-resolution view of the surgical area, they take the controls of two robotic pincers that process the gestures, weed out any incidental jolts or shakes via tremor filtration, and then perform those actions on the patient — all in real time.

While Wednesday’s demonstration focused on how the machine is used to correct hernias, medical uses for the robot are far broader. The devices have been used for surgeries as diverse as hysterectomies, on the one hand, and repair of the mitral valve of the heart, on the other.

“It’s utilized for a lot of different specialties,” said Hillis, “and it gives surgeons the ability to handle both simple and complex cases in a minimally invasive process.”

Yes, but can it make a cappuccino? 

Benjamin Bullard can be reached by phone at 256-734-2131 ext. 145.