XR for Surgical Telementoring

The goal of this project is to design and develop an extended reality environment, where a novice surgeon is performing a trauma procedure with the remote guidance from an expert surgeon.

My role was to identify the surgeons' challenges in providing remote guidance and design features to help them overcome these barriers. My approaches included task analysis, role playing, prototyping, interviewing, and user story.

We built the mock-up operating room with a surgical mannequin on the operating table and most commonly used instruments on the tray. The office environment, located at the same area yet separated by room dividers from the operating room, displayed the operative fields captured by the Hololens and live-streaming videos.

We adopted the participatory design approach - including role play sessions and prototype evaluation. For every 2 weeks, we invited a surgery onsite, first asking him to guide us through a procedure of trauma surgery and then showing him the latest prototypes that we had developed. In this, we learned 1) how the instructions were given, 2) any use-cases for our tools, and 3) if the features would be useful and in what ways.