Each year, 48 million American inpatient surgical procedures are undertaken (Stanford Healthcare). As our population continues to grow, more surgeries will need to be performed. A medical resident must undergo five years of rigorous training and practice before becoming an official surgeon. However, when scrutinizing the training of these surgical residents, we find that most of these procedures are through visual observation of veteran surgeons. When trainees gain true practice in operating on a patient, these residents are actually performing surgery on true patients in real scenarios with an attending physician overseeing the procedure. Although these surgeries do not necessary have unfavorable outcomes, this type of training may put the patient’s health in jeopardy. Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, writes in his book Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science that, “In medicine, we have long faced a conflict between the imperative to give patients the best possible care and the need to provide novices with experiences.” Our device aims to fill this disparity by giving surgeons-in-training a method to feel and practice the movements of surgery as if directed by an attending surgeon without putting a patient’s health at risk. We utilize motion capture cameras to capture the movements of veteran surgeons’ during surgery and translate that data into vectors that can be inputted into a device that is able to recreate the veteran surgeons’ movement. Such motions are learned by the user of the device in order to gain muscle memory to not only practice but truly feel the motions. More specifically, our senior design project focuses on the translation of the motion capture data into data that can be inputted into a mechanical device which can produce similar motions. We also attempt to demonstrate that this type of device is actually able to improve a subject’s physical movements and is a feasible way to develop a subject’s muscle memory.
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