Game On: Using Gaming Technology to Improve Surgical Device Design
How gaming industry lessons are affecting surgical device design. We’ve witnessed an increasing interest in cross-pollination between the gaming and medtech worlds for about a decade now. Researchers began hacking Microsoft’s Kinect for XBox 360 in 2012 for a variety of medical applications, including gesture-based telesurgery. High-performance gaming technology has improved to the point where the two industries are actually ready to meet, as surgical robotics companies try to level up in an increasingly competitive market. MD+DI chatted with two experts at Design Partners to understand more about the gaming business and how it may affect surgical device design. “Gamers were kind of geeks in their bedrooms a decade ago, and now the gaming industry is set to be worth around $300 billion by 2025, it’s currently over $100 billion, which means it’s bigger than the movie and music industries combined,” said Cormac Conaire, creative director and a partner at the Wicklow, Ireland-based product design firm. Huge worldwide tournaments, where professional gamers fight for large sums of money, sponsorships, and prestige, are part of what is fueling the remarkable surge in gaming popularity, according to Conaire. “To compete at this level, you don’t need toys; you need highly-specialized equipment properly matched to your e-sport athlete needs,” said Conaire, who has designed award-winning gaming gear for businesses like Logitech, Dell, and Alienware over the past 15 years.
What does this have to do with surgical equipment design?
To begin, we’ve seen how the surgical profession has embraced gamification in the form of virtual surgical simulation, which can be used for both training and procedure preparation. When you consider the current rate of advancement in telemedicine and the growing interest in telerobotic surgery, it’s only a matter of time before high-performance gaming skills genuinely upset the future of surgery. “Gamers and doctors have a lot of things in common. This admiration for correctness and precision. Visual and spatial abilities are important. Perception of depth. Many modern surgeons are practically staring at screens while performing their duties, and they are required to be completely immersed in their work for hours on end “Conaire stated. “So, as the gaming industry grows and millions of dollars are poured into innovation, how can we take this learning from the gaming area and mix it with our healthcare design experience… to improve surgical instruments and patient outcomes?” Motor-driven deployment devices have emerged as a prospective addition to the robotic surgeon’s toolkit for this reason.
We’ve witnessed an increasing interest in cross-pollination between the gaming and medtech worlds for about a decade now. Researchers began hacking Microsoft’s Kinect for XBox 360 in 2012 for a variety of medical applications, including gesture-based telesurgery. High-performance gaming technology has improved to the point where the two industries are actually ready to meet, as surgical robotics companies try to level up in an increasingly competitive market. To discover more about the gaming business and how it affects surgical gadget design, visit this website. MD+DI met with two Design Partners professionals. “Gamers were kind of geeks in their bedrooms a decade ago, and now the gaming industry is set to be worth around $300 billion by 2025, it’s currently over $100 billion, which means it’s bigger than the movie and music industries combined,” said Cormac Conaire, creative director and a partner at the Wicklow, Ireland-based product design firm. Huge worldwide tournaments, where professional gamers fight for large sums of money, sponsorships, and prestige, are part of what is fueling the remarkable surge in gaming popularity, according to Conaire. “To compete at this level, you don’t need toys; you need highly-specialized equipment properly matched to your e-sport athlete needs,” said Conaire, who has designed award-winning gaming gear for businesses like Logitech, Dell, and Alienware over the past 15 years.
What does this have to do with surgical equipment design?
To begin, we’ve seen how the surgical profession has embraced gamification in the form of virtual surgical simulation, which can be used for both training and procedure preparation. When you consider the current rate of advancement in telemedicine and the growing interest in telerobotic surgery, it’s only a matter of time before high-performance gaming skills genuinely upset the future of surgery. “Gamers and doctors have a lot of things in common. This admiration for correctness and precision. Visual and spatial abilities are important. Perception of depth. Many modern surgeons are practically staring at screens while performing their duties, and they are required to be completely immersed in their work for hours on end “Conaire stated. “So, as the gaming industry expands, millions of dollars are being poured into innovation, so how do we look at it?
‘How can we use what we’ve learned in the game industry to our healthcare design skills… to improve surgical instruments and patient outcomes?'”
That’s where Eugene Canavan’s surgical equipment design knowledge comes in handy for Design Partners. Canavan, who leads the firm’s healthcare design team as an industrial designer and human factors/ergonomic specialist, has more than 25 years of experience creating products for companies including Abbott, Medtronic, and Shire. Canavan observed, “Sometimes I perceive the world of medicine inside the body as if it were Star Trek.” Surgeons are deploying stents and transcatheter heart valves through exceedingly small incisions and directing them through tortuous anatomical paths to progressively distal portions of the body as minimally invasive and robotic surgery develops, coupled with downsizing. “Mechanical deployment handles, which are widespread in surgical applications currently,” Canavan added, “are teetering on the border of what is humanly conceivable.” “The fascinating thing about the human body is that it can be extremely precise or extremely forceful, but it’s quite rare to be able to do both. So if I wanted to perform something with a lot of force, I usually had to sacrifice a lot of precision, which is a major sacrifice in the realm of surgery.”