Beijing’s medical robot market is forecast to reach 7 billion yuan (US$980 million), representing more than 30% of the nation’s total, a recently released white paper finds.
The document was drafted by Beijing Medical Robotics Industry Innovation Center, a government-affiliated research organization, under the auspices of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology.
According to the white paper, Beijing has the country’s most medical robot companies, ranking first in innovation capacity.
The Chinese capital’s medical robot companies receives investment in excess of 2 billion yuan a year, it adds.
Beijing is home to a number of leading domestic surgical robot firms such as Tinavi (天智航), Rossum Robot (罗森博特) and Shurui (术锐).
The white paper states that Beijing has a rich pool of technological resources that underpin the city’s ambitions to construct a smart medical and healthcare robotics sector.
In the area of medical robot, the city’s businesses have acquired core technologies essential to human-machine interaction, prothesis motion control, recognition of human motion intentions and more.
Nationwide, China now has four city clusters that are fixated on nurturing a vibrant healthcare robot segment.
They include the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei agglomeration, the Pearl and Yangtze river delta regions and northeastern China.
Medical robotic companies in these regions have different focuses, some on robot-assisted surgeries, the others dedicated to rehabilitation and general healthcare services.
Among them, surgical robot, which is the crown jewel of the close-knit community, thrives the best in Beijing, Shanghai and Harbin, where prestigious universities play a vital role in the nexus between research and industrialization.
The white paper issue caveats, though.
Although China is the world’s second largest market for medical equipment, it lags behind the West in critical technologies and components. A shortage of homegrown equivalents jacks up the expenses of imports and application, it notes.
