What Building a Robot Taught Me About Medicine
On how robotics and bioengineering aren’t opposites, and what happens when you combine them to treat wounds.
When I first walked into the biomedical engineering lab at San José State, I thought I was there to build a robot. Six months later, I realised I was there to understand healing. The project was straightforward on paper: design a six-axis robotic arm capable of delivering dielectric barrier discharge plasma therapy to wound surfaces. Plasma therapy accelerates healing by promoting cell regeneration and killing bacteria without antibiotics. The catch is that you need to maintain a precise distance from the wound — too close and you risk thermal damage, too far and the treatment loses efficacy.
01The precision problem
My first prototype was embarrassingly imprecise. We are talking centimetre-level errors. For context, the therapeutic window for DBD plasma is measured in millimetres. I was building a system that could hurt people. That realisation changed everything. Suddenly this was not an engineering challenge, it was a moral one. Every design decision had stakes beyond performance metrics.
02Integrating depth and thermal imaging
The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking about the arm as a positioning system and started thinking about it as a sensing system. By integrating stereo depth for surface mapping and infrared thermal imaging for real-time feedback, we could adapt to the wound’s actual geometry rather than relying on pre-programmed paths. The system holds accuracy deviation under 0.1 mm over extended paths. That is not just engineering, that is the difference between healing and harm.
03What robotics taught me about medicine
Medicine is not just about understanding biology. It is about delivering interventions with precision, consistency, and safety. Robots do not get tired. They do not have off days. But robots also cannot improvise, and cannot notice when something looks wrong. The future of biomedical robotics is not about replacing human judgment, it is about augmenting human capability with machine precision. I went in thinking I would learn about servo motors and inverse kinematics. I came out understanding why precision matters when someone’s health is on the line.