A User Centred Approach to Eliciting and Representing Experience in Surgical Instrument Development

Requirements elicitation for surgical equipment development is a challenging task. On the one hand, designers need to acquire a significant amount of domain and procedural knowledge to understand and discuss surgical tasks, which is difficult and resource intensive. On the other hand, there are restrictions to surgeons observation related to ethics, regulations and availability. This paper proposes a framework for the elicitation, representation and communication of surgeons’ experience and their translation into requirements and concepts for new surgical instrument development. The framework is showcased by the development of an improved surgical instrument for laparoscopic surgery.