Outside of a handful of experimental surgeries conducted remotely, doctors are using surgical robots to operate on a patient in the same room by using a secure, hardwired connection. Real-world teleoperated robots controlled by a human in other physical locations are expected to become more commonplace as the technology evolves.
This will be particularly important when treating patients in underdeveloped rural areas, in the battlefield, Ebola wards, or when a catastrophic disaster happens half a world away. Teleoperated robots may also prove ideal for people fighting fires in chemical plants, diffusing explosive devices, or extricating earthquake victims from collapsed buildings.
The surgical robots that are FDA-approved for clinical use today which allow a surgeon to remove tumors, repair heart valves, or perform other procedures in a less invasive way do not rely on publicly available networks so breaking into these systems is minimal.
It is expected that the next generation teleoperated systems will use existing publicly available networks with temporary ad hoc wireless and satellite networks to send audio, video, and other sensory information to one or more remote operators so it is very important to provide the essential security that will be needed to operate the next generation teleoperated systems.
However, until recently, the security vulnerabilities that could affect the cyber-physical systems and methods needed to prevent or mitigate the effects of malicious hacking on networks, has received little attention in the robotic research community.
To deal with the security issue, a research team at The University of Washington (UW) BioRobotics Laboratory http://brl.ee.washington.edu led by PhD candidates Tamara Bonaci, Jeffry Herron, Tariq Yusuf, Junjie Yan, Taddyoski Kohno, and Professor Howard Chizeck are working on telerobotic security. This project brings together research in robotics, computers, network security, control theory, and machine learning.
According to Tamara Bonaci, “We want to make the next generation of telerobots resilient to some of the threats or hacking we’ve detected without putting an operator, patient, or any other person in the physical world in danger.
To begin the study, it was necessary to track the forces and torques that a particular operator applies to the console instruments along with interactions with the robot’s tools to validate the operator’s identity.
The researchers conducted security tests on the UW developed Raven II surgical robot system, an open source teleoperated robotic system designed to support research in robotic assisted surgery. The system was developed by UW Electrical Engineering Professor Blake Hannaford and former UW Professor Jacob Rosen.
The Raven II is currently manufactured and sold by Seattle-based Applied Dexterity http://applieddexterity.com a UW spin-out. The system is not currently in clinical use and not yet approved by FDA.
In May 2015, the research team released a paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04339v2.pdf detailing their research results from a hacking experiment showing that without proper network security, it would be possible for a surgeon to have their control taken or augmented while doing surgery.