Chair of Medical Engineering, 9165 RWTH Aachen University , Aachen, Germany.
Clinic for Anaesthesiology, 39058 Uniklinik RWTH Aachen , Aachen, Germany.
Biomed Tech (Berl). 2024 Mar 19;69(4):347-353. doi: 10.1515/bmt-2023-0514. Print 2024 Aug 27.
RFID tags on surgical instruments allow tracking of individual instruments. However, the tags on the instruments can restrict the handling, potentially increasing patient risks. Previous studies analyzed hand contact areas to identify potential locations for tags. However, the studies did not conduct interaction tests using instruments equipped with RFID tags, potentially neglecting the influence of haptic perception. In addition, previous studies required time-consuming evaluations by clinicians.
Therefore, the present study aims to verify the previous findings in interaction-centered tests with clinicians using real RFID tags on the instruments. Additionally, we had instrument design experts rate RFID tag positions and examined whether they could predict the clinician's preferred tag positions.
We found that nearly all RFID tag positions decreased the user satisfaction of clinicians compared to a reference instrument. Compared to previous studies, our study shows that the RFID tag influences the orientations in which an instrument can be comfortably held, which was criticized by clinicians. Instrument design experts could only predict the clinician's preferred tag positions for some instruments.
Therefore, we recommend investigating further changes to instrument design, for what the "ideal" positions proposed by the clinicians in this study can provide initial pointers.
手术器械上的 RFID 标签可实现对单个器械的追踪。然而，器械上的标签可能会限制器械的使用，从而增加患者的风险。先前的研究分析了手接触区域，以确定标签的潜在位置。然而，这些研究并未使用配备 RFID 标签的器械进行交互测试，可能忽略了触觉感知的影响。此外，先前的研究需要临床医生进行耗时的评估。
因此，本研究旨在使用器械上的真实 RFID 标签，通过以交互为中心的临床医生测试来验证先前的研究结果。此外，我们还让器械设计专家对 RFID 标签位置进行评分，并检验他们是否可以预测临床医生偏爱的标签位置。
我们发现，与参考器械相比，几乎所有 RFID 标签位置都降低了临床医生的用户满意度。与先前的研究相比，我们的研究表明，RFID 标签会影响器械可以舒适握持的方向，这受到了临床医生的批评。器械设计专家只能预测部分器械中临床医生偏爱的标签位置。
因此，我们建议进一步研究器械设计的改变，因为本研究中临床医生提出的“理想”位置可以提供初步的指导。
