
Introduction
So let me be totally transparent here to start with. About five years ago I was still in the camp of thinking that the idea of telesurgery was technically feasible but totally irrelevant. I could see that idea of controlling a robot over 5G etc was technically possible . But I just keep coming back to the “why?”
I was struggling to understand why a super busy surgeon would want, or have capacity to do remote surgery. How would they get paid? How would regulatory work, and operating rights? Legal ownership? Lawsuits?
It all felt just too messy to become more than a strange curiosity for demo purposes.
Roll forwards to 2025 - and well my mind is in a totally different place. Physical scar tissue of trying to launch a robot globally, use cases that have come up, different formats of robots and sites of care - all the things that have totally changed my mind. So let me explain more.