This work examines spatial anchoring strategies to position augmented reality guidance during surgery. We consider three strategies: anchoring to the Patient, the surgical Tool, and the Surgeon's head. These strategies were evaluated in a first experiment involving 24 non-professional participants, using two guidance techniques: 3D Trajectory and 2D Crosshair. For 3D Trajectory, Patient and Tool anchoring were more precise than Surgeon anchoring, and Patient anchoring was the most preferred. For 2D Crosshair, no significant effect of anchoring strategies on precision was observed. However, participants preferred Patient and Surgeon anchoring. A second experiment with 6 surgeons confirmed the first experiment's results. For 3D trajectory, Tool anchoring proved more precise than Patient anchoring, despite surgeons' preference for Patient anchoring. These findings contribute to empirical evidence for the design of surgical AR guidance, with potential applications for similar, less critical tasks.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713350
Effective information support tools are challenging to design for fast-paced, information rich, and difficult to predict circumstances, particularly when information is fragmented and sources are dispersed. To explore, we conducted a field study on handover and the associated information work, which included 40 visits and 75 hours of observation and interviews with doctors in a metropolitan emergency department (ED). Beyond information exchange, we found that handovers highlight doctors' proactive approach by anticipating information needs, managing uncertainties arising from dynamic information, and developing patient care plans through multiple contingencies. Expanding on the idea of handover as a multifaceted process rather than a single event, we reinforce existing calls for greater flexibility emphasising that the ascertainment of pertinent information is an ongoing, adaptive process. This work demonstrates that deciding what constitutes relevant information is a priori indeterminate when designing information systems and support tools in environments such as EDs. We propose the preservation of specific ‘relativities’ of information—such as uncertainty, particularity, incompleteness, and temporality—in designing information support tools for dynamic, critical and multi-disciplinary work environments.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713756
The action remapping between the user and the avatar creates significant perceptual and behavioral challenges. Recently, in addition to virtual environments, remapping has also given rise to new applications—immersive teleoperated robots. This paper selects immersive telesurgery, a representative scenario, as an opportunity for research, exploring the generalized effects of remapping. In such a scenario, the operator can observe through the robot's camera and use their hands to control the robotic arms, as if they were the robot. However, common remapping of spatial head-hand relations—due to camera adjustments and robotic arm switching—creates significant visual-proprioceptive conflicts and physical limitations. To explore this, we simulated a telesurgery system with 6 head-camera and 12 hand-robotic-arm remapping conditions, assessing non-surgeon participants across four surgical tasks: navigation, location, cutting, and bimanual coordination. The study examines spatial perception bias, interaction deviation, workload, and task completion time. Our findings reveal how different remapping targets, attributes, intensities, and situations affect performance, contributing to the understanding of perception mechanisms and offering insights for optimizing operations or systems.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714285
In India, topics related to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) are rarely discussed openly due to stigma. Cervical cancer, a part of this SRH sphere, is the second most common cancer among women in India, yet its awareness remains low. To understand the attitudes towards SRH, we designed a Cervical cancer awareness tutorial in Virtual Reality and collected data from 66 participants across genders and life stages (single, married, and married with children) through interviews, self-reported emotions, and physiological sensor data. Our findings revealed an acute lack of knowledge about self-body anatomy and a need for creating health literacy. Our participants appreciated receiving detailed information despite the presence of explicit imagery and advocated that critical health information should not be moderated. We offer recommendations to the HCI community for teaching cervical cancer and suggest extending these approaches to enhance education on similar critical SRH issues in India.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713807
Community health workers (CHWs) provide last-mile healthcare services but face challenges due to limited medical knowledge and training. This paper describes the design, deployment, and evaluation of ASHABot, an LLM-powered, experts-in-the-loop, WhatsApp-based chatbot to address the information needs of CHWs in India. Through interviews with CHWs and their supervisors and log analysis, we examine factors affecting their engagement with ASHABot, and ASHABot's role in addressing CHWs' informational needs. We found that ASHABot provided a private channel for CHWs to ask rudimentary and sensitive questions they hesitated to ask supervisors. CHWs trusted the information they received on ASHABot and treated it as an authoritative resource. CHWs' supervisors expanded their knowledge by contributing answers to questions ASHABot failed to answer, but were concerned about demands on their workload and increased accountability. We emphasize positioning LLMs as supplemental fallible resources within the community healthcare ecosystem, instead of as replacements for supervisor support.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713680
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into clinical practice, but its influence on patient decision-making, particularly when AI and physicians disagree, remains unclear. To examine collective advice, we investigated a breast cancer screening scenario using (1) a qualitative interview study (N=9) and (2) a quantitative experiment (N=339) where participants received either consistent or conflicting biopsy recommendations. Qualitative findings include the need for empathetic care, the importance of patient autonomy, and a desire for a four-eyes principle. Quantitative findings accordingly show that patients generally trust physicians more than AI but still tend to follow AI recommendations due to risk aversion. When both advised a biopsy, 99% adhered; if both advised against it, 25% still proceeded. In conflicting scenarios, 97% followed the physician’s advice, whereas 66% followed the AI if it recommended the biopsy. These results underscore the need for careful interaction design of collective healthcare advice to prevent unnecessary healthcare procedures.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713898
Historically, anatomical education has utilised physical models; researchers are now looking to Augmented Reality (AR) to deliver more engaging learning experiences. While there are clear educational advantages to AR, most systems lack the cognitive benefits afforded by physical models. Our work explores the potential of combining physical anatomical models and AR. We first present a design space exploring the interplay between the two. From this, we created a tangible AR system utilising a physical vertebrae model for learning spinal anatomy and axial spondyloarthritis progression. We conducted a study (n=39) to evaluate its benefits for knowledge improvement and retention, compared with a virtual AR and screen-based version. We found no difference in learning outcomes, however, the physical model improved participants' learning experience. We then conducted an expert evaluation with clinicians to explore opportunities for using tangible AR in clinical practice. Results highlight potential benefits for patient understanding, and challenges surrounding accessibility.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713733