Enhancing virtual environment-based surgical teamwork training with non-verbal communication

Date
2009
Authors
Marks, S
Windsor, J
Wünsche, B
Supervisor
Item type
Conference contribution
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
INSTICC Press 2009
Abstract

Virtual reality simulations for training surgical skills are increasingly used in medical education and have been shown to improve patient outcome. While advances in hardware and simulation techniques have resulted in many commercial applications for training technical skills, most of these simulators are extremely expensive and do not consider non-technical skills like teamwork and communication. This is a major drawback since recent research suggests that a large percentage of mistakes in clinical settings are due to communication problems. In addition, training teamwork can also improve the efficiency of a surgical team and as such reduce costs and workload. We present an inexpensive camera-based system for capturing aspects of non-verbal communication of users participating in virtual environment-based teamwork simulations. This data can be used for the enhancement of virtual-environment-based simulations to increase the realism and effectiveness of team communication.

Description
Keywords
Virtual environment , Non-verbal communication , Image processing , Training
Source
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (GRAPP 2009), pp.361 - 366
DOI
Rights statement
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in (see Citation). The original publication is available at (see Publisher's Version).