Date of Award
2007
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Engineering Science
Program
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Supervisor
Dr. Roy Eagleson
Abstract
Telesurgery provides numerous advantages over traditional surgical techniques. However, one of the significant challenges when operating using telesurgical systems is the significant time delay. This ‘temporal lag’ can be defined as the required time to transmit a data packet from,master, console to the ‘slave’ surgical system or vice versa. Therefore, as the time delay increases, the overall task completion time and error rates will also increase and can adversely degrade the perfomnance of the surgeon. Throughout this research, the human’s capabilities were investigated to complete a particular task under various time delays. A methodology was developed for evaluating human performance as a function of time delay. This methodology allows an objective assessment of human perfomnance to complete a pointing and selection tasks based on Fitts’ paradigm. It was observed that there is a strong linear correlation between the time delay of the surgical system and human performance. The results suggest that increasing the time delay will lead to a significant increase in both task difficulty and completion time. Furthemnore, this study shows that the performance of surgical systems can be measured objectively and quantitatively.
Recommended Citation
Gharib, Muna Mahmoud, "Methodology for the Evaluation of Human Performance in Time-Delayed Telesurgery and simulation" (2007). Digitized Theses. 4971.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4971