Abstract:

The Touch Surgery app was designed by surgical trainees for surgical trainees who, like many others, understood that new limits on working times hampered their opportunity to cover a good number and variety of cases in their professional careers. At present there is a great need to for simulation; In a recent study from the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, 43 percent of surgical residents want to work more than the allotted 80 hours per week, and 41 percent felt the work-hour restrictions “were a ‘considerable or moderate barrier’ to their training” (Wiegman et al). The app would allow them and their peers to rehearse operations whenever they had time for it, like at home, and whenever they had need for it like prior to the real operation. With over 150,000 downloads and over 400,000 operations learned, Touch surgery is a rapidly growing platform for surgical training.

Operating is thought to be only 25% technical skills while the other 75% is non-technical, the modules in the app are aimed at tackling the 75% through cognitive task simulation. Each module consists of the decisions and steps conducted during an operation. Users of the app can engage with the module though a learner path or a test path and receive feedback scores at the end to track their progress.

The team at Touch Surgery is a unity of surgeons and doctors work hard with gaming and animation stars. Leading the content team is the technical director on Oscar-winning films such as Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Wall-E. A user experience designer who worked at Nintendo and consulted at Ubisoft. The lead graphics engineer came from a background of teaching programming and his pursue of research into the therapeutic uses of video games (which is still going strong). Every member of the team is a gold gem in their niche of the world and the combination of skills has been able to produce beautifully accurate and immensely valuable content to enhance learning and disseminate best practice for the operating room all around the world on a free app.

True to simulation, the Touch Surgery app allows surgical trainees to build their knowledge and procedural skills before they have to apply them in a clinical setting where errors may translate to poor patient outcomes. The ability to carry a personalised simulator in your pocket provides the trainees with an unparalleled opportunity to progress their competence in a way never seen before.

Keywords:

Touch surgery, simulation, cognitive, task, simulator, simulation.