Abstract:Currently, robots have been developed and used across the various areas such as manufacturing, services, healthcare/medical, defense, and space. While the manufacturing robotics have been widely accepted by industries and have been achieving many successes, the medical and healthy robots have been paid close attention to by researchers and clinicians. The robots may be used in various divisions of medical and healthy procedures, but now they are majorly developed and successfully applied in the fields of surgery, rehabilitation, and assistance. With the assistance of medical robotics, existing surgical medical procedures could be greatly improved with less invasive and fewer side effects, which result in faster recovery times and in substantially improving both risk-benefit and cost-benefit ratios. Currently, the major successful areas of applying a medical robotics include prostate surgery, cardiac surgery, brain neural surgery, and spinal-cord surgery. In the healthy applications of robots, another successful area is rehabilitation in which both multifunctional prostheses and exercising robots have been developed and used for limb amputees and paralyzed patients, respectively. The intelligent prostheses are used to help the amputees restore some limb functions in their daily life. The paralyzed people can use a rehabilitation robot to do limb exercise for recovery of the lost functions of their arm and leg locomotion. In addition, with the fast-growing elderly population, some robots also have been developed and used as assistive equipment in their daily activities for increasing locomotion and mitigating occurrence of dementia and as a companion at home for reducing isolation and depression. In this review paper we first summarized the state of the art of the robots developed for surgeries and rehabilitations. Then the up-to-date most interesting and popular research fields related to the medical and rehabilitation robots were introduced. Recently, a number of medical and rehabilitation robotics were designed and introduced into the clinical applications. Some minimally invasive surgery robotic systems such as the da Vinci Surgical System(Da Vinci Surgery)have been commercially available and are successfully utilized to perform clinical cardiac surgeries in many countries. And robotic systems such as MIT-Manus(commercially, InMotion)and Lokomat(Hocoma)are also successfully delivering physical and occupational therapy. Although many great processes of medical and rehabilitation robotic technologies and systems have been made, there are still some limitations and issues of current robotics technologies and systems. For example, the current medical surgery robots are lack of natural and precise interactions between the robotics and doctors, which would limit the performance and safety of medical robotics. And most of the rehabilitation and assistive robots are passively operated by the users. Thus the efficiency of these robots in the recovery of limb functions is limited. In order to further improve the performance of the current medical and rehabilitation robots, the precise interaction and synergy between robots and human would be very important and critical for making use of robotics in healthy fields since one of major characteristics of healthy robots is that they will work in a human-machine-interaction environment. The natural and precise interactions between robots and human will be able to be realized by the fusion of human-machine-intelligence synergy that would make use of the cognitive abilities of human brains and the computing capacities of a computer. Finally, this paper made a perspective of the medical and rehabilitation robots briefly. It can be predicted that robotic systems will have a large number of potential application niches from youth to the elderly, and from able-bodied to disabled. In the future, medical and rehabilitation robots will be able to have the ability to capture human state and behavior(aided with wearable sensors)in controlled environments such as physical therapy sessions and working places of a doctor or paramedic. Thus the medical and rehabilitation robotics will finally have an ability to realize the natural and precise interactions between human(such as patients and doctors)and machine(robots).