Panels

Research and engineering in biomedical robotics and biomechatronics lives at a confluence of change in multiple fields. Our community's exposure to the effects of widespread artificial intelligence adoption is potentially more intense as a result of our multidisciplinary nature, and this topic deserves different, thoughtful conversations.

Artificial intelligence is a topic that has moved from a primarily academic concern to something being discussed daily in general news articles and around dinner tables. The pace and variability of changes in societal attention, and the rate of change in the technological capabilities that underpin them, is unprecedented. In addition to a recent acceleration in machine capabilities for cognition, AI is facilitating step changes in design and deployment, sensing and actuation, integration and interaction. These step changes are impacting and in some cases substantially reconfiguring whole sectors and lines of innovation. As a community that creates our ideas at the intersection of electrical, mechanical, biological, and computational systems, BioRob constituents are seeing change from multiple fronts at once and we have both opportunity and risk associated with this positioning.

In a coming era where we as a society have designed minds that will in turn help us design, craft, explore and act on ideas, what should we speak about with each other during this meeting and in the months that follow? This panel brings together world leaders in artificial intelligence, health systems, wearable biomedical technology, and bioinspired robotics to consider questions such as:

• What will our field look like in the future? What changes do we expect to see in the next six months and what might we imagine in five years down the road?
• What are we not doing right now that we should do at once and without hesitation? What are we doing now that we should in good faith simply stop doing?
• What responsibilities should we hold ourselves to with regard to our trainees and our community's leaders of the future?
• What do we imagine would be good choices for the next generation of scholars to make such that they can help push forward our multidisciplinary field in the years to come?
• What will be the key work of researchers in biomedical robotics and biomechatronics in the years ahead?

Medical robotics is advancing rapidly, with academic laboratories producing increasingly sophisticated systems for surgery, intervention, rehabilitation, imaging, diagnosis, and patient care. Yet the pathway from a promising research prototype to a clinically adopted technology is rarely straightforward. Between innovation and adoption lies a complex and often under-discussed "messy middle": the stage where technical feasibility must be transformed into clinical relevance, regulatory readiness, investor confidence, product-market fit, and real-world usability.

This panel, "The Medical Robotics Spinoff Pathway: Lessons from Innovation to Clinical Adoption," will explore this messy middle through the experiences of leaders in medical robotics who have been involved in technology translation, startup creation, clinical validation, fundraising, partnerships, and commercialization. The discussion will focus on the practical realities that academic innovators face when moving beyond the laboratory, including how to identify meaningful clinical needs, how to build a compelling proof of concept, when a technology is ready to spin out, and how to balance scientific ambition with the constraints of product development, funding, regulation, and clinical workflow.

The panel will also examine the less visible aspects of translation that are often critical to success: intellectual property strategy, founder and team formation, dilution, fundability, strategic partnerships, regulatory and reimbursement considerations, clinical evidence generation, surgeon and hospital adoption, and the role of early users and key opinion leaders. Panelists will be invited to reflect not only on success stories, but also on risks, mistakes, pivots, delays, and lessons learned from difficult decisions along the way.

Rather than presenting medical robotics translation as a clean or linear process, this session aims to provide an honest and practical conversation about what it takes to move from research impact to patient impact. By making the messy middle more visible, the panel will offer researchers, trainees, clinicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs a clearer understanding of the opportunities, trade-offs, and decisions that shape the spinoff pathway in medical robotics.