In 2006, China highlighted the importance of robotics in its 15-year plan for science and technology. In 2011, the central government outlined these ambitions in its 12th Five-Year Plan, specifying that robots be used in various roles, from helping with emergency services during natural disasters and firefighting, to performing complex surgeries and assisting society. To be used in medical rehabilitation.
Guang-Zhong Yang, head of the Institute of Medical Robotics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says that China's robotics research output has been growing steadily for two decades, driven by three key factors: "The clinical use of robotics; Increased funding levels driven by national planning requirements; and advances in engineering in areas such as precision mechatronics, medical imaging, artificial intelligence, and new materials for making robots."
Yang points out that the level of funding for medical robotics from China's National Natural Science Foundation and the Ministry of Science and Technology began to rise more rapidly in 2011 than in the previous decade.
The simultaneous increase in research output is related to the introduction of specialized robotics equipment into medical-research facilities, says Yao Li, a research scientist at Stanford Robotics Laboratory in California and founder of Bourns Medical Robotics, both based in Chengdu, China. , and Silicon Valley, Calif.
Between 1999 and 2019, the number of papers published by at least one Chinese author in the combined fields of biomedical engineering and robotics increased from 142 to 4,507, and increased twice during that period (see 'Published papers'), of According to statistics from Web of Science.
One peak was in 2008, two years after a robotic system for minimally invasive operations called da Vinci was first deployed in hospitals in China. The second was in 2017, a year after the first Chinese-designed robot for minimally invasive spinal surgery was approved for sale.
In 2019, the number of da Vinci systems installed in Chinese hospitals increased from just 8 installations in 2018 to 59 (see 'Spike in hospital robotics').
The surge follows government pressure in 2018 to encourage research on the robotics technology and its clinical application, according to Jian-Kun Hu, director of the Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery at Chengdu's West China Hospital. The central government's plan includes an intention to purchase 154 new surgical robotic systems by the end of 2020, and how the systems will be allocated nationwide (see 'Surgical robots across China').
