Safety design for medical robots

The use of robots in medicine is increasing, leading to the call for specific safety standards. This is a challenging endeavor, however, because the patient must usually be placed in the robot´s workspace and the medical staff must frequently interact with the robot. Although specific safety standards for medical robots do not yet exist, there are several medical device standards and well-established principles of risk analysis and safety design that can and should be applied. This paper presents a tutorial overview of safety design for medical robots, starting with a discussion of high-level safety requirements, followed by methods for risk assessment (or hazard analysis) and a brief discussion of some sample safety strategies.