What is it about?
Robotic systems are increasingly being used in surgery, but designing them to work effectively alongside surgeons is genuinely difficult. What makes a skilled surgeon, their physical instincts and deep experiential knowledge, is hard to put into words, let alone turn into engineering requirements. This study explored whether hands-on exploratory prototyping activities could help bridge that gap. We used low-fidelity prototypes, props, roleplay, and scenario-based activities to get participants physically engaged with the problem. This surfaced insights about instrument design, surgeon-robot ergonomics, control systems and operating theatre design and layout that would be difficult to capture through meetings, interviews or surveys.
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Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Surgical robots represent a significant investment, yet many are designed with limited input from the surgeons who use them. This study demonstrates a practical, low-cost approach for involving surgical teams early in the design process to ensure systems better align with practice before expensive decisions are locked in.
Perspectives
Spending a day prototyping with a surgeon taught me more about robotic surgery than months of reading. There's something irreplaceable about getting people physically engaged with a problem, it unlocks knowledge that simply doesn't surface in interviews or literature reviews.
James Dwyer
Queensland University of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Collaborative Prototyping for Robotic-Assisted Surgery: Eliciting Tacit, Embodied, and Situated Knowledge, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, March 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3803861.
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