Question: How do you know if robot operators, that work in hospitals (or that will be in the future) work well? who do you test it on before using it with patients?

Martin Wallace answered on 19 Mar 2012:

I’m not too sure about this. My company hasn’t made any of these robot operators yet but it might be something we could get involved in in the future.
At the moment there are robot surgeons being developed but they don’t work on their own, they need an expert that can control them from outside the operating theatre. Often there are experts in different types of operations who are able to achieve things in operations that other people can’t do because they haven’t had the practice, but if they live a long way from the patient it would be impossible for them to help that person. This is where a robot surgeon could come in, with the expert able to control the robot over the internet from the other side of the world.
In order to test the robot, however, it might be necessary to create an artificial person that contained all the necessary organs and body parts you would want the robot to operate on. This would have to be very realistic with all the different tissues and details that a real body has – which means it might be even more difficult to make this than it is to make the actual robot.

Something else they could test it on might seem quite gruesome. Some people leave their bodies to scientific research when they die, this enables medical researchers to develop better ways of curing people so it is a very thoughtful thing to do. It might seem quite nasty but it is probably the safest way of testing a robot like this, because the body wouldn’t be able to feel pain and would behave in a similar way.