A balding man is lying face down on a table when a robot arm begins piercing his head with long, needle-like tools. It sounds like a torture chamber, but the robot could one day restore a full head of hair to the follicularly challenged.
Restoration Robotics of Mountain View, California, is developing a robot to perform hair transplants twice as fast as a team of clinicians, with less pain and scarring.
In today’s 10-hour-long hair transplants, a strip of healthy, hairy scalp 1 centimetre wide and 15 centimetres long is removed under local anaesthetic, and the gap sewn up. A team then manually separates the strip…
