Usability test with medical personnel of a hand-gesture control techniques for surgical environment

Computer-assisted orthopedic surgery (CAOS) and augmented reality provides guidance for surgical environments in minimally invasive procedures. However, the surgeon’s interaction with those systems has limitations, because the surgical environment must be kept sterile. Two touch-less interaction techniques were evaluated within this research work, a vision-based technique used by META® glasses and electromyography-based used by MYO® arm-band. The research aim was to establish the most appropriate one touch-less interaction technique to manipulate a CAOS system. Usability was evaluated through an experiment with 4 orthopedic surgeons and 47 undergraduate students, in a simulated setting. The results suggest that both techniques can be relevant and useful in a surgical environment. However, the MYO was more efficient and possibly more effective to perform the manipulation tasks than META. In addition, the MYO arm-band was perceived as further satisfactory compared to META glasses and shown an improved overall behaviour in the CAOS system manipulations tasks.