Bulletin No. 2, 2024

The Sentire Endoscopic Surgical System employed while maintaining safety and stability. He believes that establishing a startup which gathers a team of 400 experts is necessary to address such a complex system integration problem. “Our Sentire surgical system has over 13,000 components; that’s more complicated than an electric vehicle (EV), in terms of actuation and control, as an EV has about 10,000 parts for actuation and control. The Sentire system adopted the full vertical system integration approach where we custom-design most of our actuators, gearboxes, motor controllers, sensors, PCBs, imaging system, and operating system.” Sentire has passed all clinical trials and is ready for operation. “We are a local startup and hope that Hong Kong patients can benefit from the most advanced technology that is safe and affordable,” says Professor Au. The team is also eager to create a greater influence by bringing this ground-breaking technological invention to the world. Shaping the future Professor Au and his team have recently received the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) registration approval for the usage of Sentire for operations in the mainland and Hong Kong. This is the first time that a Hong Kong-developed medical robot has received such an approval. They have also applied for European certification for Sentire, aiming to open the door to the future of healthcare. He hopes that surgical robots can tackle the shortfall in surgeons and help to standardise surgical procedures. “There are approximately 20,000 hospitals on the mainland, and the number of times surgery is performed annually reaches 40 million, equivalent to the total of the United States and Europe combined,” he says, making it particularly important to standardise surgical procedures, so that more surgeons can be trained and more patients served. The engineer has one great ambition. “My dream is for every hospital to have a surgical robot platform developed by us,” he says. “I am proud to bring Hong Kong’s finest products and technologies to the world.” 9