Movement Augmentation for Robot-Assisted Surgery (Talk)

Many surgical tasks require using three or more tools simultaneously. Currently, surgeries are typically performed by a main surgeon and an assistant, where it is known that their performance can be affected by miscommunications. Providing the surgeon with tools and techniques to control three or four surgical tools by themself would avoid miscommunication and could improve the outcome of surgery. However, the current interfaces allowing a surgeon to control several tools offer only limited precision, dexterity and intuitiveness. Therefore, I developed a dedicated foot interface and techniques that allow an operator to control three tools intuitively and continuously. Using individual motion patterns, the operator could simultaneously control a novel flexible endoscope and its two tools, as was tested in an intervention on a pig stomach. In addition, I used my interface to systematically investigate the main characteristics, opportunities and limitations of movement augmentation for "three-handed manipulation". In my presentation, I will present these works and outline the opportunities that movement augmentation opens up for applications in industry and medicine, especially for solo surgery.