Increasing accessibility to medical robotics education

To overcome existing barriers in medical robotics education, this paper presents work done during a joint-collaboration project that creates a new educational toolset and associated curriculum for demonstrating telesurgery applications. Created using the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robotics set, programmed with LabVIEW, and capable of doing real-time closed-loop control over large distances, the project team developed a product aimed at influencing 6^th to 8^th grade classrooms by exposing the students to engineering design and communication topics within the real-world application of medical robotics.