The future of surgery will involve remotely controlling robots that perform operations in other locations to the healthcare professional. Currently, surgical devices like these are not meeting the expectations of surgeons’ needs in terms of human factors, intuition, and control. These future control devices will create new demands on the human body – prolonged staring at a screen, precision control, unconstrained posture. How can we keep surgeons immersed in the flow of remote surgery?
Design Partners applied their expertise in healthcare, human factors, and gaming devices to explore future remote-surgery control stations. (After all, gamers and surgeons share some important qualities – an appreciation of precision and accuracy, visual-spatial skills, depth perception ability, total immersion in a task). Using a simulation of the human body, VR was used to study the human factors & ergonomic issues of existing solutions in a three-dimensional environment. The body’s posture was then optimized using Gravity Sketch’s mannequin and the ideal future controller was built around that human form.
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