Surgeon's Assistant

Surgeons have one of the most demanding jobs in the world and deal with stressful situations daily. One such situation is verifying a patient's X-rays while operating. Normally, this means leaving the sterile environment of the operating room, losing vital time and increasing the risk of infection.

In Slovenia, the company Adora Med has developed an interactive assistant to make a surgeon's work easier while improving patient care. The Adora assistant allows for contact-free viewing of a patient's scans during a surgical procedure and inside the sterile environment of the O.R., thanks to gesture-based software.

A surgeon downloads the patient's scans onto a computer and accesses them using an electromagnetic Bluetooth bracelet attached to his or her arm. The bracelet's sensors respond to the surgeon's instructions via hand gestures: clenching a fist, spreading the fingers, moving a hand to the left, to the right or upwards.

"Adora Assistant is an advanced and promising tool for surgeons to remote-handle multi-slice images (MRI and CT scans) during complex orthopaedic operations. It has already helped me perform dozens of complicated procedures," says Dr Jyrki Nieminen, a surgeon from Coxa, the biggest orthopedic hospital in Finland, where the system is now in place.

Studies conducted at the Maribor medical centre show that the use of Adora Med's assistant and other similar interactive systems reduces surgery duration by up to 20 percent.