Correlating Personal Resourcefulness and Psychomotor Skills: An Analysis of Stress, Visual Attention and Technical Metrics.

Carmen Guzmán-García,Patricia Sánchez-González,Francisco M Sánchez Margallo,Juan A Sánchez Margallo,Nicola Snoriguzzi,Enrique J Gómez,Ignacio Oropesa,José Castillo Rabazo

doi:10.3390/s22030837

Abstract

Modern surgical education is focused on making use of the available technologies in order to train and assess surgical skill acquisition. Innovative technologies for the automatic, objective assessment of nontechnical skills are currently under research. The main aim of this study is to determine whether personal resourcefulness can be assessed by monitoring parameters that are related to stress and visual attention and whether there is a relation between these and psychomotor skills in surgical education. For this purpose, we implemented an application in order to monitor the electrocardiogram (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), gaze and performance of surgeons-in-training while performing a laparoscopic box-trainer task so as to obtain technical and personal resourcefulness’ metrics. Eight surgeons (6 nonexperts and 2 experts) completed the experiment. A total of 22 metrics were calculated (7 technical and 15 related to personal resourcefulness) per subject. The average values of these metrics in the presence of stressors were compared with those in their absence and depending on the participants’ expertise. The results show that both the mean normalized GSR signal and average surgical instrument’s acceleration change significantly when stressors are present. Additionally, the GSR and acceleration were found to be correlated, which indicates that there is a relation between psychomotor skills and personal resourcefulness.

Highlights

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralModern surgical education is focused oTn making use of the available technologies in order to train surgical residents, monitor their progress and assess their surgical skill acquisition [1]
The metrics that are related to stress that can be extracted from galvanic skin response (GSR) measurements that are found in the literature are varied in their complexity
This study stems from the need to find objective assessment methodologies for personal resourcefulness skills in surgical education, while researching the relation between psychomotor and personal resourcefulness skills

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralModern surgical education is focused oTn making use of the available technologies in order to train surgical residents, monitor their progress and assess their surgical skill acquisition [1]. Nowadays, commonly split into either technical or nontechnical categories [2]. Nontechnical skills encompass varied competencies such as cognitive readiness [4], decision making [5], interpersonal abilities (i.e., communication and teamwork [6,7]) and personal resourcefulness (i.e., attention and stress management) [2,8]. This artificial bifurcation has helped to further categorize surgical competency into subcategories of skills.

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