The Stapedotomy is a standard ENT (ear, nose and throat) surgery, where the surgeons use surgical micro hooks and forceps to replace the stapes with a small titanium implant. However, there are some challenges with this procedure. Especially, the non-ergonomic posture of the surgeon increases the hand tremor and leads to an inaccurate positioning of the implant. This may cause hearing loss and the patient may need a revision operation. In this paper, we present the first laser sintered disposable manipulator for ENT surgery, which allows the surgeon to move a micro hook in three directions via a joystick console, while his/her hands are located on an armrest. This may increase the surgical outcome by enhancing the ergonomics and therefore may reduce the number of revision operations. We show that the fabrication cost of the single-use robot does not increase the operation expenses drastically. To conclude, our preliminary evaluation with a middle ear phantom indicates that a basic surgical maneuver can be performed via the presented robotic system.

In this contribution a novel human-assistive robot for laparoscopic surgery is presented. The purpose of the proposed system is to improve the ergonomics of laparoscopic surgery by reducing the physical load on the surgeon. Selected examples of existing robotic systems for medical and manufacturing applications are compared to the suggested system. After a brief description of the system's main features, a velocity-based admittance controller for regulating the interaction force is introduced. The desired interaction force is the sum of the required supporting force and a force-feedback, signalizing workspace constraints. The supporting force varies in magnitude and direction depending on the surgeon's posture and allows for individual adjustments to the needs of the surgeon on duty.

In this article, a new Micromanipulator System (MMS-II) for middle ear surgery is presented. The purpose of this work was to develop a simple but effective manipulator that would enable the surgeon to move standard surgical instruments in a precise way even under non-ergonomic conditions. The MMS-II is lightweight, small, and easy to use; it requires no PC, besides a small microcontroller-based joystick console. Such features, together with a practicable sterilization concept and the availability of a multiplicity of surgical instruments, allow the system to be used in standard surgical procedures.

This paper presents a 64times64 pixel micro-bolometer based temporal contrast IR sensor. The pixels of the sensor independently and asynchronously respond to changes in thermal IR radiation and communicate respective events via arbitrated AER. A 46 dB-gain, small-area, ultra low-power, low-mismatch differencing switched-capacitor amplifier has been designed for reading out the bolometer front-end. The chip has been fabricated in a 0.35 mum standard CMOS process and covers about 4times4 mm2of silicon area. An amorphous silicon (a-Si) microbolometer array has been processed on top and contacted to the pixel circuits. Measurement results of the ROIC and the bolometer element and first results of the final temporal contrast IR sensor are presented.