Designing Wearable Personal Assistants for Surgeons: An Egocentric Approach

Abstract

Shahram Jalaliniya is a phD fellow at the It university of Copenhagen, where he is a member of the pervasive Interaction technology (pIt) lab. His research interests include wearable computing, HCI, pervasive computing, and multimodal interaction. Jalaliniya has a master's degrees in information systems from lund university and in software and technology from the It university of Copenhagen. He is a member of IEEE. Contact him at jsha@itu.dk.Thomas Pederson is an associate professor at the It university of Copenhagen, where he is a member of the pervasive Interaction technology (pIt) lab and the Interaction Design Group. His research interests include HCI, contextaware systems, and pervasive/ubiquitous computing. pederson has a phD in computing science from umeå university, sweden. He is a member of the ACm. Contact him at tped@itu.dk.

A Wearable Personal Assistant for Surgeons – Design, Evaluation, and Future Prospects

“…Since wearable computers are physically closer to the human body more than any other computing device ever has been, and they (in the visions of for instance Thad Starner and Steve Mann) are intended to extend both the user's body and mind, we think it is close at hand to therefore adopt a human body-and-mind centric design approach [2]. To emphasize the tight integration between a single mind, body, and computer we use the term "Wearable Personal Assistant (WPA)" instead of the shorter but more general term "wearable assistant" often used by Thad Starner and others.…”

“…Fig. 1) illustrates how we see the WPA to be very integrated into the perception-cognition-action loop depicting how the wearer of the system interacts implicitly and explicitly with both the surrounding world and the WPA itself [2]. A design framework for Wearable Personal Assistants (WPAs) in hospital settings based on hospital work characteristics elicited through interviews and literature review (left-most column) and assistance mechanisms considered by us as WPA designers (the boxes distributed over the three types of assistance defined by the framework).…”

“…The three ideas for assistance highlighted in bold were the ones chosen for implementation and evaluation based on a combination of technological feasability offered by the available WPA platform (Google Glass) and expressions of need from interviews with orthopedic surgeons. [2] In our simplified model of a human agent acting in the world (Fig. 1), the WPA can potentially provide three main types of assistance: (1) action assistance; (2) cognitive assistance; and (3) perception assistance.…”

“…After discussing the utility of the initial functionalities derived from the design framework with three orthopedic surgeons in a Danish Hospital, we focused on three of them: (1) touch-less interaction with medical images in surgery room; (2) tele-presence during surgeries; and (3) mobile access to the Electronic Patient Records (EPR) during ward rounds [2]. These three functionalities have bold frames in Fig.…”

“…What are the potential advantages and limitations of using such devices in hospitals? To answer these questions, we implemented and evaluated a wearable personal assistant (WPA) for orthopedic surgeons [2]. In this article we provide a more detailed look into the design and evaluation of this previously presented prototype.…”