Engineer and Manufacturers

Engineers and manufacturers are closely related when it comes to the telesurgery actor network.  Lanfranco et al. (2004) notes that some of today's leading telesurgery manufacturers were at one point engineers or surgeons who worked on developing the system.

Both engineers and manufacturers are, of course, advocates of telesurgery.  Unlike actors such as government regulators or doctors, these actors do not deal with the potential downsides of telesurgery.  Continued development and eventual widespread commercialization of telesurgery robots would be economically beneficial to any engineers and manufacturers involved in the process.

When considering their position in the ANT network, it is worth (once again) mentioning that the interdisciplinary nature of telesurgery means the engineers and manufacturers will be interacting with many of the other actors.  Many of the current telesurgery robots were developed as a collaboration between engineers and surgeons (Lanfranco et al., 2004).  These relationships will continue to be paramount to advancing the network to a more stable stage.

The following video is a demonstration of the dexterity of one of the machines created for telesurgery: