Researchers from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Anne Arundel Medical Center conducted a study on gestural technology's effect on surgeon trainees' performance. This new technology was created to improve communication between surgeons and their trainees during laparoscopic surgery.
(Source: Pxhere)
For this procedure, the surgeon inserts a small camera into a patient’s abdomen. Surgeons watch the instrument’s movement through a live video. While watching the video, surgeons cannot touch anything because their hands must be sterile. They can only use voice to communicate with surgeon trainees. Trainees must pay attention to the doctor 100 percent of the time during surgery.
The team developed a new tool called the Virtual Pointer. The Virtual Pointer allows surgeons to instruct trainees and point and draw on the live video without compromising their sterile hands. The tool uses visual and verbal info to communicate what the surgeon needs. A surgeon provides verbal instruction and visual cues to the tool, and the tool lays out what the surgeon wants the trainee to do.
The team wanted to explore if visualization impacts the cognitive load of trainees in a positive or negative way. The team predicted that the cues would lighten the cognitive load over time but that initially the load would increase while the trainee gets used to both cues. The study proved the researchers right, but only partly so.
During the study, the team measured the physiological responses of the trainees while using the Virtual Pointer, with a focus on electrodermal activity. In this case, the electrodermal activity was the amount of sweat on the skin which was measured with wristbands worn by the trainees.
The results showed no increase in cognitive load, even when first using the tool. The cognitive load stayed the same throughout the study. Trainees were able to continue performing training while processing new information. Without the Visual Pointer, trainees stopped for clarification more often than those using the tool. With Visual Pointer surgeons were able to communicate their needs more clearly and trainees could perform more tasks than they could with standard training.
The findings prove there is hope for a more efficient training method that uses the same amount of mental effort, but more research needs to be done before the Visual Pointer can be used in clinical settings.
The study was published in CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
