Goal for this project:

Develop a telestration system for use within laparoscopic cholecystectomies. This would be an innovative method of communication as a means to assist attending surgeons in instruction and help residents with laparoscopic surgical training.

Challenges for this project:

• Address accuracy issues with a touchless interface.
• Understand range of motion and fatigue that a surgeon undergoes during laparoscopic surgery, and minimize burden that this additional technology would impose
• Understanding where breakdowns in communication occur during a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. 

My role in this Project:

I took multiple roles during this process. these included: Principal Investigator, Co-PI, Researcher, Data Analyst, and Usability tester. My duties included User Research and writing research paper, Data collection and Analysis, Project management and co-ordination, Designing research studies and test plans, and implementing user needs into the design. 

Length of project: 

2 years

Project Type: 

Research Project done in conjunction with the Bodies in Motion Lab

 

During my time with the Bodies in Motion Lab, I was a UX researcher that was working with the Anne Arundel Medical Center to develop a system for telestration.  This telestration system would provide a method to annotate live laparoscopic video to avoid having to pause to communicate something during surgery.

Given the large scope of this project, I was not the only UX researcher on this project. As a result, I served a number of roles during this process, both as the Lead PI as well as part of the team.

My first role in this project was assisting with data collection for another researcher. For this part, I helped to develop a test document for usability testing with laparoscopic surgeons. I then helped to collect gestural data from a number of different laparoscopic surgeons. From research, we had found a number of common gestures that were supported by the technology that we had at this time.  We video recorded surgeons as they made a number of these gestures with the touchless interaction device, and then compared both the video recording and the input from the device to assess  which gestures would be best suited for this project. In specific, we looked at accuracy, completion time, and error rates among the types of gestures, which would be an important thing to address with annotation of surgical video.

I then worked as the Principal Investigator of another part of the project, which was to break down the laparoscopic cholecystectomy into tasks and sub-tasks through a Hierarchical Task Analysis. I talk about this more in another section (https://christopherkaiwong.com/hierarchical-task-analysis/), but this required designing a research study, gathering participants, creating a task analysis based on recorded laparoscopic video, and then refining the task analysis based on input from laparoscopic surgeons.  This was important to understand where the gaps in communication happened and understand the context for where we might be implementing this technology.

I was then a Co-Principal Investigator for another study, which involved combining the findings from the previous studies.  In this role, I co-ordinated between hospital personnel and research staff in developing a telestration prototype. I did usability testing with surgeons with our developed prototype, analyzed video recordings of the tests to understand their movements, and communicated the user findings to the development team.  In addition, I did user research to develop a metric of assessing the quality of movement that the surgeons made with our telestration system.  In this way, we were able to gather both qualitative and quantitative research data which we could use to write several academic papers. Our first prototype interaction is enclosed below, and academic papers are in the Academic Publications section.