Surgeons to turn to Wii to sharpen their scalpel skills?
Forceps... swab... Nunchuk...
Next time you’re about to go under the knife, you might want to ask your surgeons how much Wii training they've had to boost their medical expertise and manual dexterity.
According to a report in New Scientist magazine, researchers at the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona have found that its surgical residents performed better during simulated surgery after they’d spent some time on a Wii.
The researchers concluded that the precise on-screen movements sometimes required to use the Wii’s Remote and Nunchuck controllers were reason for the increased dexterity.
While the researchers are considering using this information to build a Wii-based training simulator for surgeons, they may prefer simply to buy a few copies of Trauma Center: Second Opinion. It turns living rooms into an operating theatres - it says here - allowing gamers and budding sawbones to perform life saving surgery on virtual patients with a selection of on-screen medical tools.
COMMENTS
Woohoo!
.. both my kids are going to turn into excellent surgeons, make loads of money, and look well after their old man and his wife in their golden years.
Public health doctors....
....will only be able to practice on the old battery-and-buzzer game "operation."
(said as someone just hours home from key-hole kidney surgery spread across 2 hospitals as there was a bed shortage as usual - the op was fine though)
Python
"Anaesthetic" .....CLANG!!
the surgeons gown, thank you
Echoes of spoof "rejected wii games"
...also found here (can't see the youtube link atm)
http://www.break.com/index/rejected-wii-games.html
@Dan Hibiki
I couldn't agree more. The DS uses a stylus that in terms of the manipulation and precision is far more like the movements involved in wielding a scalpel than those used when chucking a Wii controller around the living room. Perhaps the increased hand eye coordination is more to the point, in which case one wonders whether these medical boffins performed a properly controlled experiment where some Doctors played Wii, some played PS3 and some played Xbox360. Of course the games played would need to be the same game for a properly controlled experiment, though perhaps a relaxation to games of the same genre would allow for an experiment featuring each of the three main consoles.
Otherwise how can any conclusions beyond improved hand eye coordination be made?
