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”Gesture recognition,” robotic nurses to help surgeons of the future
Purdue University researchers are developing a system that recognizes hand gestures to control a robotic scrub nurse or tell a computer to display medical images of the patient during an operation.
Juan Pablo Wachs, of the Purdue University, said that both the hand-gesture recognition and robotic nurse innovations might help to reduce the length of surgeries and the potential for infection.
The “vision-based hand gesture recognition” technology could have other applications, including the coordination of emergency response activities during disasters.
The new approach is a system that uses a camera and specialized algorithms to recognize hand gestures as commands to instruct a computer or robot.
At the same time, a robotic scrub nurse represents a potential new tool that might improve operating-room efficiency, said Wachs.
“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,” said Wachs.
Other challenges include providing computers with the ability to understand the context in which gestures are made and to discriminate between intended gestures versus unintended gestures.
A scrub nurse assists the surgeon and hands the proper surgical instruments to the doctor when needed.
“While it will be very difficult using a robot to achieve the same level of performance as an experienced nurse who has been working with the same surgeon for years, often scrub nurses have had very limited experience with a particular surgeon, maximizing the chances for misunderstandings, delays and sometimes mistakes in the operating room. In that case, a robotic scrub nurse could be better,” he said.
The hand-gesture recognition system uses a new type of camera developed by Microsoft, called Kinect, which senses three-dimensional space.
The findings have been detailed in the journal Communications of the ACM, the flagship publication of the Association for Computing Machinery. (ANI)
Disclaimer: Bioscholar is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. The articles are based on peer reviewed research, and discoveries/products mentioned in the articles may not be approved by the regulatory bodies.
Another cute project in a long line of old research + kinect = new research. Not to belittle kinect’s enabling of a flood of great technologies, just sayin’ is all. The capabilities the kinect provides is not new to researchers in the field and researchers have no excuse for not previously pursuing the research that they are not trying to pursue using a kinect. Kinect is great for prototyping and for hobbyists, don’t get me wrong, and its low overhead cost and features allows for more rapid prototyping, but serious researchers in computer vision did not need the kinect to do serious research, and throwing a kinect into a project, or worse, making a project revolving around a kinect, does not make it new research.
Cons: requires surgeons to use already busy hands for another function normally performed hands-free (voice + nurse experience), hand gestures more difficult to computationally recognize than voice “gestures” unless under rigid spatial constraints, requires hand to be in line of sight and in a certain range of angles of the kinect, what to do when the robot mis-recognizes the command, how do you re-enter the same command when the system has already misrecognized it, requires surgeons to learn/recall yet another set of things in addition to the 5000 things they need to recall, improvement in workflow questionable–new technology should increase performance and/or decrease cost, removes nurse but replaces him/her with robot so OR environment is not simplified, article mentions nurses need experience but does not mention how the replacing robot will be endowed with such experience… just because it is a robot does not give it artificial intelligence automatically, limited dexterity/dof of a robot cannot conform to a dynamic surgical workspace like a human can.
Pros: ??? Better for antisocial surgeons??
Conclusion to audience: Move along, nothing to see here.
Conclusion to researchers: Move along.