Watch researchers hack a surgical robot

Published on Jul 14, 2016

In the future, your surgeon could be a machine. Teleoperated surgical robots can be controlled from a distance to operate on patients in hard-to-reach places. But as information travels between a human on one side of the world and a robot on the other, it’s vulnerable to attack.

In the first episode of our series ‘Can I Hack It?’ Motherboard visits researchers at the University of Washington who are exploring how teleoperated surgical robots could be hacked—so they can spot vulnerabilities before human patients are at risk.

We get hands on with the RAVEN II surgical robot and find out for ourselves how difficult it is to control when a hacker takes over. Could we be risking assassination by hacker?
RAVEN Surgical Robotic System