Modalities compared.
We recruited 12 graduate and undergraduate students, including eight males and four females, all 20 to 30 years old, to test the effectiveness of modality training on a mock surgical task simulating an abdominal incision and closure (see Figure 4), a task requiring five instrument classes: scalpel, scissors, needle, retractor, and four hemostats, a total of eight instruments.
We tested Gestonurse under three conditions: speech (S), gesture (G), and combined speech and gesture (SG). Note that in SG, we used the gestures and speech (see the online Appendix) to request the surgical instruments but not simultaneously. While Gestonurse can deal with simultaneous requests from multiple modalities, simultaneous requests using different modalities is not desirable during real-life surgeries. Surgeons are allowed to use only speech, only gestures, or speech and gestures one at a time during surgery.