Keep your coats on: augmented reality and sensework in surgery and surgical telemedicine

Abstract

In Norway, the health sector has recently been looking to the petroleum industry for inspiration with respect to innovative solutions for telemedicine and patient safety. In this article, the potential for and challenges associated with augmented reality (AR) tools and practices in surgery and surgical telemedicine are investigated. Work practices in co-localised surgical operations in a neurosurgical operating theatre are investigated and analysed using central organising principles for distributed collaborative work as envisioned by Integrated Operations in the petroleum industry. Digital representations are found to take on a central role in surgical work, and they show a promising potential for the future inclusion of neurosurgery into the portfolio of telemedicine. However, the article warns against organising telemedical work processes according to theoretical principles for division of labour that are not rooted in actual practices. In line with a constructivist approach to ontology, there are many realities that may be augmented, and inadequate work processes may cause construction and augmentation of inadequate realities and hence suboptimal outcomes of surgical procedures. This possibility of AR enabling both desired and undesired outcomes is in the article referred to as the Janus face of augmented reality.

A Systematic Literature Review on Extended Reality: Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality in Working Life

“…Safety was especially emphasized in the training of security personnel (Lukosch et al, 2015;Passos et al, 2017), construction workers (Nykänen et al, 2020), and underground coalminers (Grabowski and Jankowski, 2015). As another example of increased safety, Haavik (2016) inquired unspecified AR tools use in surgical operations to access to internal body parts with minimum disruption. In addition, accessing previously inaccessible could mean accessing space-located knowledge in real time (Anastassova and Burkhardt, 2009).…”

“…(Dembski et al, 2020;Oprean et al, 2011;Passos et al, 2017)) or a singular restricted area such as a building (Maftei and Harty, 2015), a shelter (Albadra et al, 2020) or a boat (Barreau et al, 2015). These were counted as immersive, since they offer a full spatial experience, opposed to a narrower object, such as a human body in the work of surgeons (Haavik, 2016) or a virtual model of a foot for shoemakers (Mandolini et al, 2017).…”

“…Four articles focused on the transformation of practices around XR (Bratteteig and Wagner, 2012;Haavik, 2016;Maftei and Harty, 2015;Wagner, 2012). They surveyed the social and material role of XR in different working life settings (design of a new building, surgical work, and urban planning).…”

“…Hayashida (2018) from Fujitsu Laboratories relied on behavioural economics and equilibrium theory of intimacy while trying to find solutions to fulfil people's needs for relatedness in remote work. Extended reality might be a solution for increasing people's need for relatedness, but as the entire concept and its key features are still maturing, we might ask, following Haavik (2016), what do we actually want or need the technological solutions for.…”

Formal and modelling frameworks for Social Holonic Control Architectures

“…Besides, despite multiple assertions of its importance [2,12,13], we can equally observe that human integration into HCA remains marginal in today's HCA field. As a matter of facts, this marginality is not only the prerogative of HCA, but is pretty observable in the IMS community's works [12] even though cooperation between human and technological entities has been widely studied, especially in air/rail traffic control [14,15], applied robotics [16], or carpooling [17]. Concerning human-machine cooperation, many efforts have been provided to balance human-machine interactions, improve human-machine communication, or understand human behavior [18,19].…”