Filtering in the context of Robotic Assisted Surgery
With reference to the cluster's understanding of Filtering as an environing technique, Robotic-assisted surgery can be understood as an information filter in the operation room. However, RAS also filters emotions and senses of the operating team and can lead to 'emotional incompetence' in a surgical situation. At the same time, team communication in the operating room is considered a key patient safety factor [2]. This also extends to emotional expressions of the surgeon that are processed by other team members in the operating room and influence their behavior [2]. In RAS, the monitoring of each other’s well-being is impaired, since a lack of visual access caused by the robot often results in a lack of awareness of others’ emotions [3]. While operating through a console with some distance to the operating field, the surgeon is unaware of what the team experiences [3]. This negatively impacts the cooperation of the team and, thus, potentially the outcome of the operation.
This situation acted as the starting point for the workshop and provided our motivation for exploring the design of a responsible filter that recalibrates the emotion filtering effects of RAS.