Neuroadaptive Systems for Improving User Performance - Demonstration in Robotic Surgery

Abstract: Innovations in technology can potentially enhance human capability in a broad range of tasks, from daily living to complex robotic surgery. However, as technology becomes more complex, the workload and situation awareness demands on a user will correspondingly increase. Robotic-assisted surgery is an example of a transformative technology, but telesurgery techniques can add to the complexity of the procedure and decouple the operator from the patient – increasing the workload on the surgeons. This talk will discuss our work on two key challenges:

1) real-time user-sensing technology and algorithms capable of reliably monitoring the complexity of user workload and 2) implementing of these models into neuroadaptive interventions in a robotic surgery use case. We show that user-aware, adaptive systems that can enhance surgical robotic training and user performance.

Short Biography: Denny Yu, PhD, CPE, is an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine. He is also a Fulbright Scholar in Austria and was a 2017-2023 Summer Faculty Fellow at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing. Dr. Yu’s expertise is in human factors engineering, specifically in quantitative sensing techniques to assess individual and team behaviors in high workload-dynamic environments. In conducting this work, his team has received the RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award (RO-MAN 2021), the 2021 Human Factors Prize (by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society), the 2023 IEA/Tsinghua Award for Collaborative Human Factors and Ergonomics Education, and the 2024 Young Investigator Award from the Applied Ergonomics Society.