Safety Design View: A conceptual framework for systematic understanding of safety features of medical robot systems

A variety of medical and surgical robot systems have been developed in academia and industry and commercial products are actively used in modern operating rooms. However, there is no safety standard that specifically governs the design of medical robot systems. Despite the availability of several safety design guidelines, the absence of a basis or foundation for safety makes it difficult to describe safety designs in a systematic manner, and to share knowledge and experiences on safety with others. In the meantime, the scale and complexity of recent medical robot systems have been increasing and this further complicates the effective representation and sharing of safety designs. As an approach to this issue, we propose the Safety Design View, a conceptual framework that can capture and describe both the design-time and run-time characteristics of safety features of medical robot systems in a systematic and structured manner. To illustrate the application of the Safety Design View, we collected a set of frequently used safety features, based on our literature review of safety in the medical robotics domain, and show how we can more effectively describe and understand safety designs of medical robot systems.