Semi-Autonomous Assistance for Telesurgery Under Communication Loss

Telesurgery has a clear potential for providing high-quality surgery to medically underserved areas like rural areas, battlefields, and spacecraft; nevertheless, effective methods to overcome unreliable communication systems are still lacking. Furthermore, it is not well understood how users react at the moment of communication loss and also during the loss. In this paper, we aim to analyze human response by proposing a telesurgery simulation framework that models an environment incorporating local and remote sites. Furthermore, this framework generates structural data for human behavior analysis and can provide different forms of assistance during the communication failure and at the communication recovery. We investigated three different types of assistance: User-centered, Robot-centered and Hybrid. A 12-person user-study was carried out using the proposed telesurgery simulation where participants completed a peg transfer task with random communication loss. The collected data was used to analyze the human response to a communication failure. The proposed Hybrid method reduced temporal demand with no increase in completion time compared to the baseline control method where users were unable to move the input device during the communication loss. The Hybrid method also significantly reduced both the task completion time and workload compared to the other two proposed methods (User-centered and Robot-centered).