Surgical Robotic Nurse

Abstract

Robotic surgery is a new technological innovation in health care. This new technology has gained enormous popularity. A gesture controlled surgical robotic nurse (SRN) is presented in this paper. The SRN assists the main surgeon in the operating room (OR). It passes the surgical instruments as and when required by the surgeon. This reduces “mistakes” (e.g. missing information, miscommunication and delays) in the OR. SRN is a good alternative in absence of scrub nurse and also frees her to perform some concurrent more complicated tasks. Real time hand gesture recognition is done and converted to corresponding instructions and communicated to robotic arm which passes the requested surgical instrument to the surgeon. This paper focuses on developing a gesture recognition algorithm which is robust to hand orientation and scale changes.