A hand-held drilling tool for orthopedic surgery

A novel hand-held drilling tool devoted to orthopedic surgery is presented in this paper. The starting point of the study is the conjecture that the invasiveness of interventions might be reduced by adding sensing, reasoning, and control capabilities to existing tools, in order to obtain controlled penetration in the patient´s body and automatic discrimination among layers of different tissues. Due to the particular environment in which the tool is to work, the requirements in terms of human friendliness and safety impose a careful design of the human-machine interface. The proposed approach to the development of a mechatronic tool for surgery is discussed, with emphasis on the functionality and performance of the device and the limited-usage expertise required. New applications for the proposed concepts in nonsurgical environments requiring hand-held tools are foreseen