Incorporating Touch-Screen Technology into Minimal-Access Simulation

Introduction: A novel technique for utilizing touch-screen games in minimal-access simulation. The use of simulation for the acquisition of minimal access skills has been well documented.1–3 Current simulators have a limited number of tasks to perform, however, which can become boring and repetitive over time. The computer gaming industry has a great deal of experience in creating tasks that hold the user's interest and provide significant scalability of task difficulty. We therefore explored the idea of exploiting the billions of dollars already invested by the gaming industry, to create compelling and useful laparoscopic simulation tasks. Materials and Methods: 1× laparoscopic simulator; 2× laparoscopic stylus; 1× touch-screen device with games preloaded. Description of Video: 00.04 Current Simulation tasks; 00.43 Demonstration of capacitive touch; 01.27 Making the capacitive touch instruments; 02.02 Playing Fruit Ninja; 03.00 Playing Angry Birds; 03.51 Typing an email. Results: The resulting m...