Question: how far have you got with the technology your trying to create.

Neil Dhir answered on 17 Jun 2014:

I have not got very far at all actually, which sometimes is rather frustrating but also very inspiring as well, because the field is wide open!

The things we are trying to do are quite difficult (as anyone would tell you who is doing research), and that will always be the case with something that is new. But in my case getting to grips with the academic field I am in has been quite daunting as well, given that it was all quite new to me, so there was a lot of background work that needed to be done, before I could attempt to do anything which was actually worthwhile publishing. And even when that happened, the contributions my work had to the overall field, were tenuous at best.

But things should be speeding up from now on, especially as there are a lot of people working in my area around the world. Especially more and more people are realising what a great impact machine learning can have on healthcare, and not just in healthcare robotics, but in all echelons of healthcare. The smarter our treatment methods the better they will be, and I think machine learning is the key to that.