In 2006, China highlighted the importance of robotics in its 15-year plan for science and technology. In 2011, the central government incorporated these ambitions into its five-year plan, specifying that robots should be accustomed to support society in an exceedingly wide selection of roles, from aiding emergency services during natural disasters and firefighting, to performing complex surgery and helping in medical rehabilitation.
Guang-Zhong Yang, head of the Institute of Medical Robotics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says that China’s robotics research output has been growing steadily for 2 decades, driven by three major factors: “The clinical utilization of robotics, increased funding levels driven by national planning needs, and advances in engineering in areas like precision mechatronics, medical imaging, computer science and new materials for creating robots.”
Yang points out that funding levels for medical robotics from the National Scientific Discipline Foundation of China and also the Ministry of Science and Technology began to increase more sharply in 2011 compared to the previous decade.
The accompanying rises in research output are closely associated with the introduction of specialised equipment in medical-research facilities, says Yao Li, a research scientist at Stanford Robotics Laboratory in California and founding father of the corporate Borns Medical Robotics, based in both Chengdu, China, and geographic region, California.
Paper published:
Between 1999 and 2019, the amount of papers published by a minimum of one Chinese author within the combined fields of biomedical engineering and robotics increased from 142 to 4,507, and spiked twice during that period, consistent with data from the online of Science. One peak was in 2008, two years after a robotic system for minimally invasive operations called ‘sculptor' was first deployed to hospitals in China. The second was in 2017, a year after the primary Chinese-designed robot for minimally invasive spinal surgery was approved as purchasable.
Sudden increase in hospital robotics:
In 2019, the quantity of engineer systems installed in Chinese hospitals that year leapt from only 8 installations in 2018 to 59. This surge followed a 2018 government push to encourage research on robotics technology and its clinical application. The central government’s plan included an intention to buy 154 new surgical robot systems by the top of 2020, and a breakdown of how the systems would be allocated nationwide.