As a result, most surgeons report experiencing discomfort while performing minimal-access surgery, a 2022 study found. About one-fifth of surgeons polled said they would consider retiring early because their pain was so frequent and uncomfortable. A good mixed-reality headset, then, might allow a surgeon to look at a patient’s surgical area and, without looking up, virtual screens that show them the laparoscopy camera and a patient’s vitals.
“I’m usually turning around and stopping the operation to see a CT scan; looking to see what happened with the endoscopy [another small camera that provides a closer look at organs]; looking at the monitor for the heart rate,” Horgan says.
Horgan says that wearing headsets during surgeries has improved his effectiveness while lowering his risk of injury.
Just if it wasn’t clear to anyone else.
This is the weirdest cyberpunk future.
On one hand, we have surgeons performing surgery with literal augmented reality,
On the other hand, if you’re poor you’ll never have an iota of a chance of seeing that doctor.
Sounds like an american healthcare problem to me
Yeah, this sounds like a problem for only the 5% of the world who live in a specific country.
That latter point doesn’t really apply if you leave America.
Admittedly, I only ever entered an operating room under anesthesia, but could you just, you know, put the displays somewhere else?
This seems like one of those informercial “problems”.
As someone who does this exact thing, no you can’t just put the displays somewhere else. None of this shit is wireless. Wireless is verboten in healthcare.
Which leads to my initial reaction: aww poor surgeon has to tilt their head a bunch, perhaps move their torso or even their feet? Of course this is the reason to retire early not the millions they are paid in the corrupt healthcare system.
I’m the motherfucker that let you have displays in the OR. I contorted my body in incredible ways to get that cable to your displays. My body hurts all the time. I cut through walls and spent long nights and early mornings to get those displays working so you only had to slightly move your head.
Bitch ass fucks.
But the vision pro is permitted to use wireless?
Ok but neither of you should be experiencing workplace injuries. If wireless is unacceptable sterilized wired headsets should be accessible. I don’t want doctors getting RSI
“I wanna drink some milk, but it’s so flimmin-flammin hard to open.”
Seems similar to factory mechanics using Google Glass to look up schematics etc.
Of course, Google being allergic to commitments discontinued it anyway, despite its successes in industrial applications.
Looks like you’re doing brain 🧠 surgery! Exciting! Like the world of Cheetos and fritolay products!
Taste the rainbow!
Even in non-surgical settings, operating room ergonomics is a huge area of research right now. Even in a routine colonoscopy there are often a half dozen workers attending to the patient, and making sure they can all reach at a comfortable angle and height, without twisting their neck to read a display, is a big challenge.
Need more cranes, harnesses and mission impossible theme songs. There, I solved the problem.
I want to live in the aug reality future where professionals like surgeons dand uncompromising standards with zero absolute zero bullshit like ads or intrusions
I always figured it would eventually have decent use cases, just not doing office work from home and joining meetings and shit like they marketed it initially. There are jobs out there in the physical world where easier, more streamlined access to information is godsend.
I do hope they won’t kill it off.
this *seems* long overdue
Lol wut. Surgeons bitch when they’re wearing so much as a headlamp. A bulky-ass VR headset will never be a thing in the operating room beyond the odd techy doctor who’s in a VR infatuation phase.
The Davinci surgical robot has a VR headset kinda built into it so surgeons can see in 3D when they’re doing robotic assisted surgeries, but that’s not something they wear : it’s a little station they sit at and just lean forward into, no straps or weight or anything.
Ergonomically, I’m not sure that’s better. Sure they don’t have weight on them that the headset would add, but being able to freely move your head without holding it against a stationary headset would be quite an improvement.
Surgeons are some of the worst people I’ve had the displeasure to interact with, and I meet people all over the US for healthcare work. I can’t imagine the difficulty people have of teaching a living god a new way of doing their work.
For it to have any chance you’d have to get it introduced in med school and brought with so those gods can demand the hospital cater to their wills.
/shrug. No insight on the effectiveness of the design; that’s just what’s in use now.
I wonder who experiences greater discomfort surgeons or factory workers.
Not that we can currently afford factory workers this tech of course. I’m just imagining if the price of this type of tech was to drop dramatically perhaps it could be used in other fields.
Although by then maybe those jobs would be automated anyway?
I don’t think price is that big of a deal for a factory, really. The machine that worker in using probably costs a hell of a lot more than $3.5k, and in most cases even basic parts/repairs are going to cost that much.
It’s not just the $3.5k cost of a headset. There are recurring costs to maintain the headsets. Even larger than that is cost of converting existing work instructions into the virtual environment and maintaining them. Plus expect push back from some workers, possibly losing some to other companies. And if it’s a union shop, expect them to use the change as leverage in next negotiations.
I would absolutely require more money to strap a chunk of electronics to my face for 8+ hours a workday.
Also you need to provide evidence it’s better than training. I imagine there would be a ton of engineering labor involved in making programs to make it work and that’s not cheap
Airbus in Toulouse has one section of a production line where work instructions, tool tips, and prints are available to the mechanics on VR headset. There are surely other industries that are further along, but in aerospace, that Airbus line is goals. I’ve seen it in an open house / show off situation. I am still skeptical how mechanics use VR headsets for 8+ hour shifts day after day.
I’m sure they’re not as intense as video game VRs, those start giving me headache and nausea after about 45 minutes. 8+ hours seems like it would be a lot. And at 8+ hours, it’s not even just the vision/nausea, I have to assume it becomes a question about ergonomics of neck and shoulders supporting the extra weight.
I’ve played with a few VR headsets and there’s absolutely none of them that I have found that I would enjoy wearing for eight hours a day. They’re all far too heavy.
The new AR prototype glasses from Meta could be useful in that case. Since they’re not heavy and still allow you to see reality. They aren’t a consumer product because of the price, but maybe a surgeon wouldn’t care about the expense as much?
Industrial engineer here, it depends on the factory work. The positions described in the article involve stuff I wouldn’t be ok with my workers doing. But also yeah OSHA is weak but sometimes ergonomics are bad enough to get them involved. It’s an important thing that my generation of engineers were taught to take seriously.
Also AR headsets are very much something we want to implement more in factory settings but the Vision Pro isn’t safe for that. Too heavy and no visual pass through when unpowered. Additionally there are some hygiene issues with wearable tech that have become known concerns when it’s used in industrial environments.
Also beyond that it’ll need a decent value proposition. A factory making small run complex products like trucks or airplanes has great use for it, but a place doing something like injection molding or large scale food manufacturing doesn’t
Surgeons are the most bitch-ass people among doctors, who are already shitty. I install their gear and will literally run away from one who looks like they’re coming with a question. We work when they’re gone, so only a shithead among shitheads would have so little of a life to hang around and question my work. I imagine the ones that know anything about networking are at home but sometimes there’s this little fuck coming acting like he knows computer networks because he works on humans.
Apple, slowly transitioning into a medical industry supply business.
Another drop to the pile of shit!
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How so?
They’re using it in a way that it was designed for (creating little virtual mirrors of real displays/data to reference) when performing surgery.
It might not have been what Apple intended it for, but it’s hardly the end of the world like “surgeon peforms surgery according to LLM” would be.
It might benefit the surgeons and patients, if it helps reduce fatigue, mistakes, and/or miscommunication, like the article suggests.
