UMinho states that the researchers at stake are Álvaro Sampaio, António Pontes, Paulo Simões and Pedro Arezes, from the Engineering and Architecture schools, to whom HFES awarded the prize for the best article of 2019 in the magazine Ergonomics in Design.
The UMinho team proposes an RFID system (radio frequency identifier) incorporated in the surgical instruments so that they are immediately detected and are not forgotten in the patients’ bodies. In particular, the study analyzed and mapped areas of contact between the hands of surgeons and seven surgical scissors.
The idea was to ensure, through the assessment of the professionals themselves, that the RFID position does not disturb the handling of the instruments.
The multidisciplinary work innovated in the standards of the areas of hand-product contact, that is, in the way the user interacts manually with an artifact.
The award-winning article is entitled “Hand-product contact point detection on surgical instruments: a user evaluation”.
HFES was born in 1955 in Los Angeles, has 65 branches in North America and Europe, and brings together more than 4,000 professionals.
