Profiling Juan Wachs: Surgeons could use his hand-gesture system to control robots

By Susan Karlin

NOTE: This is an overview of an article which appeared on IEEE Spectrum Online on August 19, 2013.

Never underestimate the power of brainstorming! When a student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana proposed a robotic nurse that could hand instruments to a surgeon during an operation, his professor and other students laughed. Later, one of the students developed some algorithms that suggested it could actually be accomplished.

The professor, Juan Wachs, Ph.D. said, “If we don’t try this, we’ll never know.” Today, Wachs and his students are part of a multinational team developing a surgical robot, dubbed Gestonurse. According to Wachs, “Most surgical mistakes are related to miscommunication between operating teams due to understaffing, high noise levels, long working hours, and changing operating room personnel.” The Gestonurse is designed to respond to hand gestures and verbal commands that correspond to specific instruments used by surgeons. The main goal is to reduce medical errors. Wachs’ focus is on developing the speech and gestural recognition software for the Gestonurse project. Thanks to an anticipated three-year grant of more than US $1 million from the Qatar National Research Fund, Wachs and his team are currently working on building a version of Gestonurse that can be tested in mock surgery scenarios. He is also involved with a multidisciplinary team at Purdue collaborating with SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., to reconfigure its Taurus military robot for medical purposes. The robot was initially designed to disassemble bombs, but it can also be a dexterous surgical assistant that is easily moved between operating rooms.

Photo: Greg Ruffing

Dr. Wachs and two of his students, Mithun Jacob and Yu-Ting Li, were finalists for the Best Student Paper Award at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. The paper was selected as one of the five finalists from over 600 submissions.

See http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~jpwachs/gestonurse/ for more details, a video, and photos about the Gestonurse.