A literature survey of smart manufacturing systems for medical applications

Medical devices and products are a special type of manufactured object. Medical applications normally have higher requirements for quality, complexity, personalization, precision and low fault tolerance than other types of manufactured product. It is therefore especially important to develop smart systems to support all phases of medical-related manufacturing. However, in recent years, there is lack of a thorough literature survey for the smart system research in this area. Meanwhile, new technologies have been rapidly developed recently, but a comprehensive outlook of the future research trend is still missing. Thus, in this work we survey and analyse recent research achievements in detail. The first aim of this paper is to determine what smart manufacturing system research is important for the medical applications, as well as identifying the essential supporting technologies. Second, key research areas and challenges are identified and discussed to guide the future research in this area.