Interactive Systems for Surgical Telementoring – TELEMENTOR

Surgery is a lifelong learning endeavour, much of which happens through mentoring: when a mentee surgeon operates side-by-side with an expert mentor. However, mentees cannot always access experts for training. While remote collaboration systems aim at breaching this gap by making expert surgeons available remotely, they do not fully support surgical work as they focus on supporting the transmission of instruction, rather than the transmission of knowledge. TELEMENTOR is a human–centred project drawing from Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) methods, with an original approach to supporting mentoring remotely by drawing from social and learning science theories, to design, build, and evaluate tools that support remote training during physical tasks. The outcome will be tools through which experts not only can provide distant instructions, but also novices can effectively acquire new knowledge from experts. To achieve this, we will first (WP1) expand the knowledge of surgical mentoring, understanding the learning needs that inform a mentor in making decisions on their apprenticeship method. Then, using this understanding, we will (WP2) create tools where remote experts become active participants in the creation of mobile views, so they can gather information necessary for effectively transmitting knowledge. Following, we will create dual-user gesturing tools where mentees can interact with digital information while performing physical tasks, enabling them to express information to the remote expert that can inform the latter in adapting their mentoring strategies. Finally we will (WP4) integrate the two techniques and institutionalize them by deploying the final result at a teaching hospital, to study their situated use. TELEMENTOR will create tools that increasing the mass of surgical talent, contributing towards the democratisation of healthcare and to decreasing its costs.