Kinect’s been strapped up to flying deathcopters, powered a home motion capture studio, and now it’s taking a trip through the human body.
A bunch of graduate students over at the University of Washington have hooked Kinect up to a 3D map of people’s bits and pieces, to provide vital force feedback information for tech-enhanced surgery.
“For robotics-assisted surgeries, the surgeon has no sense of touch right now,” Howard Chizeck, UW professor of electrical engineering, told the university’s paper. “What we’re doing is using that sense of touch to give information to the surgeon, like ‘You don’t want to go here.’ We could define basically a force field around, say, a liver. If the surgeon got too close, he would run into that force field and it would protect the object he didn’t want to cut.”
The group had originally planned to use a $50 000 CT scanner to provide the necessary data, but it turned out Kinect provides similar functionality at a fraction of the cost.
“It’s really good for demonstration because it’s so low-cost, and because it’s really accessible,” says electrical engineering graduate student Fredrik Ryden, who designed the system over a single weekend. “You already have drivers, and you can just go in there and grab the data. It’s really easy to do fast prototyping because Microsoft’s already built everything.”
Now they just have to include some cool achievements, like “Stitched up 5 patients with surgical equipment left inside body cavities.” Or perhaps a checkpoint feature. Just in case.
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