Validating Touch Surgery™: A cognitive task simulation and rehearsal app for intramedullary femoral nailing

Creation and Global Deployment of a Mobile, Application-Based Cognitive Simulator for Cardiac Surgical Procedures

“…Issenberg Clearly, such a virtual trainer or app with realistic procedural steps meets many of the desired features and can be useful for surgical training and rehearsal. 12 In our study, Touch Surgery provides feedback and repetitive practice with varying difficulty in various aspects of cardiac surgery. At some point in training, the learner has to learn, remember, and reproduce many relatively mundane but critical steps that have to be performed in a precise order and reproducibly.…”

“…12 Thus, Touch Surgery and other surgical apps potentially could be used to allow trainees to learn the steps of an operative procedure in a convenient mobile format prior to the actual surgery. 12 By validating the intramedullary femoral nailing module using this app using a similar experimental design, Sugand and colleagues suggested that trainees can demonstrate cognitive competencies prior to performing surgical procedures in the operating room and that this app is an effective adjunct to traditional learning methods and curricular development. However, these and other similar modules will need to be tested further by observing predictive validity in the operative environment.…”

“…However, these and other similar modules will need to be tested further by observing predictive validity in the operative environment. 12 Recognized is that the cognitive components of surgery are of substantial importance in developing decision-making. Issenberg Clearly, such a virtual trainer or app with realistic procedural steps meets many of the desired features and can be useful for surgical training and rehearsal.…”

“…12 However, with these cognitive simulators available as an adjunct to traditional learning, there is little downside to not making these apps immediately available to trainees.…”

Educational technology: revolutionizing surgical education

“…The validity of Touch Surgery as a cognitive rehearsal and simulation tool has been evaluated. For example, studies involving different surgical procedures have shown Touch Surgery has key measures including content, face and construct validity to accurately represent surgical content, look realistic and differentiate between expert and novice [8,9,10].…”