Robotic scrub nurses that intuitively recognize hand gestures? They're not here today, but neither are they the merely stuff of science fiction. One day, surgeons might use gestures to control a robotic scrub nurse or tell a computer to display medical images of the patient during an operation.
It's a concept reminiscent of the film Minority Report, observes Juan Pablo Wachs, PhD, assistant professor of industrial engineering at Purdue University and one of the brains behind the innovation.
Hand-gesture recognition and other robotic nurse innovations might help reduce the length of a surgery and the potential for infection, according to Wachs. And vision-based hand-gesture recognition technology could have other applications, including coordinating emergency response activities during disasters.
Wachs suggests that a robotic scrub nurse represents a potential new tool that might improve operating-room efficiency; he and his colleagues write about this in the February issue of Communications of the ACM, a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery.
"One challenge will be to develop the proper shapes of hand poses and the proper hand trajectory movements to reflect and express certain medical functions," Wachs explains. "You want to use intuitive and natural gestures for the surgeon, to express medical image navigation activities, but you also need to consider cultural and physical differences between surgeons." Each may have his or her preferred gestures.
Other challenges include providing computers with the ability to understand the context in which gestures are made and to discern intended versus unintended ones.
You don't want the robot to hand the surgeon a hemostat when she starts talking to another person in the operating room and makes "conversational gestures," Wachs says.
So, will robots replace scrub nurses? Maybe, he says. It will be difficult for a robot to replace a nurse who has extensive experienced with a particular surgeon, he acknowledges. However, many scrub nurses have only limited experience with a given surgeon, which increases the likelihood of misunderstandings, delays, and errors. In those cases, he says, "a robotic scrub nurse could be better."
He's already developed a prototype, and he tells HealthLeaders Media that he expects to have a fully operational one the OR in four to five years.
Robotic scrub nurses aren't a new concept, but most research has focused on voice recognition; little has been done in gesture recognition, Wachs explains. "Another big difference between our focus and the others' is that we are also working on prediction, to anticipate what images the surgeon will need to see next and what instruments will be needed,"Wachs says.
So what sorts of surgery will be most appropriate for this technology?
He points out that, to date, robotics have been deployed primarily for endoscopic and laparoscopic surgeries, as has the Da Vinci. "Open surgeries, such as trauma surgeries, have not used robots in any way. This is the main objective of our system," he tells HealthLeaders Media. "In general, I believe that there is no limit to the extent that robots can be used in the OR. Are they going to replace surgeons? Most likely they are going to complement them."