There’s no doubt that video gaming consoles have come a long way. We’ve gone from gigantic consoles that needed many accessories and controllers, to small boxes that can fit snugly in a drawer or on a shelf, and no accessories required. Yes, technology is certainly advancing and gamers are reaping many benefits from it. But, surgeons too? Yes, surgeons at Sunnybrook Hospital are now using the XBox Kinect to help them during their procedures and to keep the sterile integrity of operating rooms.
We’ve all seen surgeons on TV or even in real life that rely on television monitors in the operating room to guide them through procedures, showing them where to go, what to cut and what to suction. In the past though, the surgeon had an assistant that would flip through frame after frame, sometimes as many as fifty or a hundred frames, because the surgeon often needs to go back and forth during one procedure. Sometimes surgeons don’t have assistants though, and in these cases the surgeons must leave the operating table, wash up, and go over to the computer. After touching the keyboard and the mouse, the surgeon then needs to scrub back in so that they can again enter the sterile environment of the operating room. This can add as much as two hours onto any operation and poses a slight risk to the sterile environment.
But now an engineering team, Matt Strickland and Jamie Tremaine out of Waterloo, have realized that the XBox Kinect could do the same thing. The same way that millions of people use the gaming console to jump over ski hills and give boxing ring jabs in their own living rooms, surgeons can now use in surgery; and the process is much the same. When people are playing games on the console, the system uses their hand and body movements as commands, telling the console what to do next. In the operating room, it works the same way. The XBox is programmed to correspond with the surgeon’s movements. If they move one way, the XBox will move forward a few frames. When they move another way, it will go back as many frames as they need.
The solution is an ingenious one, really, as minimizing risks in operating rooms is always one thing that every hospital strives to achieve. With reducing the amount of contamination, and keeping sterile areas absolutely sterile, it could reduce the amount of time and money that are spent on operations, simply by reducing the time for it. It could also open up operating rooms sooner for patients that need them. Most importantly though, shaving this much time off a procedure and keeping the operating rooms as sterile as possible, could turn gaming consoles into life-saving tools.
