Designing embodied and virtual agents for the operating room: Taking a closer look at multimodal medical-service robots and other cyber-physical systems

Mistakes in the delivery of health care contribute significantly to patient mortality and morbidity, with an estimate of about 100,000 such cases per year. Some of these mistakes can be directly traced to a lack of effective communication among the surgical team. Studies of verbal and non-verbal communication in the operating theater found that miscommunications frequently occur. While there are other factors that lead to negative case outcomes, such as “team instability” in which teams of nurses and surgeons are not cohesive, or lack of minimal personnel, this chapter will focus specifically on those problems related to lack of communication. This problem is partially solved by the adoption of intelligent sensors along with automation and intuitive technologies in the operating room (OR) to assist surgical teams and improve patient safety. Three different kinds of cyber-physical agents are presented in this chapter. They consist of the Gestix and Gestonurse systems, which are used respectively to assist the main surgeon by displaying patient medical images and in the delivery of surgical instruments, and a telementoring agent that is used during the performance of surgical procedures so as to provide expert guidance to a surgeon in rural areas or in the battlefield.