Perceived Usefulness and Acceptance of Communication Support System in Laparoscopic Surgery

In laparoscopic surgery, senior surgeons spend great efforts to convey knowledge to their trainees. Any misinterpretation of the instructions may lead to inevitable errors that have a great impact on patient safety. To support efficient knowledge sharing, we design a communication support system, Virtual Pointer, to convey trainers' gestures directly onto the laparoscopic video for trainees to see. We implement the design in an international surgical conference and evaluate the perceived usefulness and acceptance of the system among senior surgeons and surgical trainees. The results showed that the system facilitated the trainees to complete the task, increased their knowledge, and reduced the trainers' guiding efforts. The study indicates that conveying the gestures directly onto video has the potential to support the intraoperative communication. Barriers in the acceptance of the system highlight the design of novel interaction mechanisms to unobtrusively integrate this technique into the surgical workflow.