Inside the development of Johnson & Johnson’s OTTAVA™ Robotic Surgical System

One way we’ve listened to surgeons is by bringing Ethicon surgical instrumentation onto OTTAVA™. Through Ethicon, we have decades of deep understanding of the science of tissue interactions with instruments, as well as a track record of trusted surgical instrument performance⁵. Surgeons said they wanted that same trusted instrumentation technology in robotic form, so we’ve built it in.

Setting up the OR and the devices and technologies required for a procedure can add additional time and complexity to the overall procedure. OTTAVA™ offers unique architecture and automation capabilities, with intelligent robotic arms that can move into a setup pose or a procedure pose with the push of a button⁵. This feature can support the surgical care team assisting at the bedside by limiting the manual nature and complexity of moving the robotic arms into position and giving the surgeon confidence that their staff can get OTTAVA™ into the right position^10**.

We also learned that surgeons want greater access to data and insights. In the current environment, fully sharing data from a given robotic procedure with surgeons or hospitals is limited.

So, data-driven insights from OTTAVA™ are designed to be accessible through Johnson & Johnson’s Polyphonic™ Digital Ecosystem. Polyphonic™ is an open, secure system that brings together surgical data, video, devices and AI insights, allowing healthcare teams across different surgical sites to collaborate more effectively⁵. The ability to share this information is incredibly valuable for learning, and ultimately for improving patient outcomes.

Today, the footprint of most robotic systems in terms of size and weight is big, which means that not every OR can be a robotic OR. To bring in a robotics system, hospitals may have to redesign their layouts or reinforce the floor to support all the weight. That can be very challenging and costly.

Because of its category-defining architecture, with the arms integrated into the table, OTTAVA™ was designed to fit into various OR sizes^5***. In our clinical trial results, we found that OTTAVA™ was able to go into operating rooms as small as 243 square feet that were previously considered too small for robotic surgery^5***. That’s a game changer.

What we’ve heard consistently from surgeons, surgical care teams and hospital administrators is the importance of more space in an operating room. OTTAVA™ creates more space for surgical teams to work, coordinate and communicate³.

Several remarkable and dedicated robotics engineering teams have been working to develop OTTAVA™. Mechanical and electrical hardware engineers designed the intelligent robotic arms. Together with systems integration engineers, they integrated them into the table and made sure that the motors and the sensors inside these arms performed correctly.

Robotics controls and software engineers created the automation algorithms; cloud and data engineers architected OTTAVA™ connectivity and analytics capabilities. Human factors engineers ensured the ergonomics, usability and the natural interface of the system. And clinical engineers made sure that the clinical workflows are effective and streamlined.

It has taken excellence along all of these dimensions to bring OTTAVA™ to life. I’m so proud of our engineering teams and their commitment. They could bring their extraordinary talent anywhere to any industry and are choosing to use it to elevate surgical care.

In nonrobotic procedures, surgeons are able to tilt the operating table and use gravity to move anatomy out of the way to gain access in a procedure. This is valuable for the patient because it minimizes potential trauma to tissue.

In robotic procedures today, they’re not able to do this because the robotic arms and the surgical table don’t move together. You would have to remove surgical instruments, undock, tilt the table, then put everything back.

OTTAVA™ has table-integrated architecture “twin motion,” which means that the arms and the table move together, in synchrony^{8, 9}. That capability of using gravity that surgeons are used to in a nonrobotic world? Well, we brought that to them in the robotic world.

Unequivocally yes. OTTAVA™ isn’t a fixed-function robot that does the same thing throughout its lifetime. Think about a software update on a car. The update enhances it and allows it to have new capabilities.

OTTAVA™ was designed the same way. It’s a continuous innovation platform in terms of digital, software, automation and AI functionality⁵.

Simulation enables us to create a digital twin of the robot in the virtual world, as well as a digital twin of the entire operating room. The simulation is created with geometric precision, accuracy in lighting, accuracy in the physics of both the robot and other components of the OR. I envision a future in which teams could rehearse a procedure and personalize it for the patient before ever setting foot in an OR.

And with new simulation techniques, I envision us also being able to simulate surgical scenes inside the human body with high fidelity to help surgeons train and practice situations that perhaps would have taken decades to encounter in real life.

We designed OTTAVA™ to address real-world challenges and help transform the surgeon and care team experience.

OTTAVA™ does this by leveraging advanced AI-based simulation for preoperative planning and training experiences, or by creating and sharing data-driven postoperative insights via Polyphonic™.

Whether it’s by creating advanced AI-based simulation for preoperative planning and training experiences or by creating and sharing data-driven postoperative insights via Polyphonic™⁵ , we have designed OTTAVA™ for what’s next in Surgery⁵.