College Times

Media Credit: Ryan Ruiz

Attention all video game junkies: Contrary to popular belief, you might not be wasting your life away in front of the television screen all those hours playing with the new Nintendo Wii.

A new study from Arizona State University and Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center shows that games like Wii’s “Marble Mania” can actually be useful tools in training medical students to become surgeons.

Recently CT, had a chance to catch up with Assistant Professor Kanav Kahol of ASU’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, who was a key player in the development of this Wii research project.

 

College Times: How did you first suspect that the Wii game “Marble Mania” might actually help surgeon’s skills prior to entering the operating room?

Kanav Kahol: I bought “Marble Mania” and was actually using it, and based on my previous experience with developing surgical tools I knew that this could be applied to the surgical world.

How did the research work?

We actually had these surgical gloves that you wear and they can actually measure your hand movements, so we had digital hand movements during surgery and we actually went ahead and did a correlation between the movements of actual surgery and the digital movements of playing with “Marble Mania” and we found a very, very high correlation.

Is it being used as a training tool now?

Every surgery resident that walks into Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center goes through a month of training and about 10 percent of it is actually Nintendo Wii-based training. 

Are there any other games that are used besides “Marble Mania”?

About six or seven of them really apply. The basic idea is to look for games that require fine motor control. See, if you are playing tennis that is not going to contribute to surgery because that’s cross movement.

What is the traditional process for training surgeons before games like these?

There are two components we have for conventional training. Before anything else, it use to be trained on patients, and that was not the best way to go about it, so this is when the simulation world was invented, which is basically a psychical submersion into virtual reality games.

Do you think this research will have an impact worldwide on surgery training techniques?

I think the impact will come from two things. One is idea of a take home simulator. The time that residents are spending in the hospital is now being decreased, so having a simulator that they could practice at home and could be monitored is definitely worthy. The second thing is that we are hoping this can actually be applied in third world nations and developing nations because they cannot afford the simulator that is $100,000, but on the other hand they can probably afford something that is about $200. 

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