Experimental Study of Surgeon's Psychomotor Skill Using Sensor-based Measurement

The aim of this study was to identify the measurable parameters to evaluate psychomotor skills and hand dexterity for surgical procedures. An expert surgeon and a group of non-surgeons underwent a simple reaching and pointing task and the data was collected using positional sensor on haptic device. A few parameters were extracted and analyzed from hand movement data such as trial time, trajectories errors, motion smoothness, economy of path length and position errors from target. These parameters were used to compare the performance of psychomotor hand movement between surgeon and non-surgeon. The result shows that the performance of surgeon was better than non-surgeon group for almost all parameters studied. The finding also shows that three out of five parameters were significant to differentiate the performance between surgeon and non-surgeon which are trial time, motion smoothness and errors from the target point. This finding has important implication for developing a parametric assessment model to evaluate basic skill level in surgical procedures.