How was the U.S. government involved in the early development of telepresence surgery? What will ...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) first sought to develop telepresence surgery for space flight medical emergencies. Distance surgery thus has the potential of making surgical expertise available on battlefields, on space stations, and in remote rural areas. Several research groups are working on telesurgical systems. Some of this work is funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, which first conceived of robotic surgery and which still sees remote surgery as a way of saving lives on the battlefield and protecting surgeons from dangerous environments.