Surgical Robotics: May the Force be with you
- Steve Bell
- Mar 25
- 14 min read
When the daVinci 5 launched last year - there was some, but not a huge amount, of noise about the new features they added. The tower, the menus, the workflow, the console, and oh yes - Force Feedback. But it didn’t get a huge amount of hype. Why? Well because millions of procedures had been done without force feedback to date… and quite well, so it seems.
And many die hard da Vinci users felt - “Well I just don’t need it…”
And finally there was not much evidence that it actually helps clinically (let me come back to that)
Oh and it comes with about a 28% premium on price for those force feedback instruments. Yikes.
But is Force feedback mis-understood, and do some recent studies demonstrate that force feedback may actually have some value - all be it not always directly clinical . And as da Vinci 5 is the first and only system with force feedback… WAIT what? No it isn’t. In fact it was not even the second or third or fourth or sixth or tenth. What?!?!
The da Vinci 5 is actually the 8th commercial system to get force feedback - yes NUMBER 8
And in terms of systems that have that capability (including some non launched) it is number 12. Yep 12 and almost 20 years late to the party.
Let me go deeper here because this may surprise you...
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