Knowledge Sharing in Surgical Telementoring

As technologies are changing our lives, our emergent social practices in turn shape the directions of the future tools.

Today, a new training practice, surgical telementoring, begins to penetrate into surgical care. In surgical telementoring, a less-experienced surgeon performs a surgery with the remote guidance from an expert surgeon. The current telecommunication system used here include video, audio, and video annotation. This system may work. However, it is not prevalently accepted. One of the major complaint is that the communication is fractured in distributed environment.

With this project, I aimed to elucidate the pain points of the users in using current telecommunication system and identify the potential design targets for new tools.

I designed an experiment comparing between co-located and distributed collaboration, and conducted communication analyses to investigate the impacts of geographical distance on the team knowledge sharing process.

I examined the distance impact on the time to task completion, discourse structure, communication content and communication patterns. The results show that distance indeed makes the team communication less efficient by increasing explicit acknowledgments from the remote surgeon. These acknowledgments lead to ambiguity in the team coordination, as the local surgeon jump in and take control over the task process, before they gain sufficient understanding of the context. Leveraging on the Common Ground Theory and Self-determination Theory, I illustrate the dilemma that surgical telementoring is facing - more local surgical trainee's autonomy is associated with less communication efficiency, yet indicating a better learning experience, as shown in the design space below.