TechTool Thursday 064 Touch Surgery

TechTool review Touch Surgery on iOS and Android

The Touch Surgery app is unlike any app I’ve seen before. It simulates surgical procedures to allow teaching and testing of students and trainees. Touch Surgery has a huge team behind it who have created surgical simulation software. The procedures and operations contained in the app are authored by different surgeons from across the world.The aim is to develop a collaborative resource consisting of best surgical practice in order to share and learns with other health professionals

Website: – iTunes – Android – Website

Design

This app is a pleasure to use. Everything from the icon, the screen layout, the fonts, and colour schemes are just right. Navigation through the app is smooth and it did not crash on me at all. A model for how medical apps should look

User Interface

Touch Surgery Android

Touch Surgery iPad

Touch Surgery iPhone

Clinical Content

• The app contains over 50 surgical procedures.
• A couple are included when you install the app, others have to be downloaded.
• The modules cover a range of surgical specialties and include procedures from chest tube insertion to acute trauma craniotomy
• When you enter your area of interest, the app suggests videos that might interest you.
• Each module has ‘test’ and ‘learn’ options. The learn option shows you step-by-step how to complete a surgical procedures. After this, you can test your knowledge.
• All the modules use excellent graphics and gestures to allow the user to interactively learn.

Cost

• The app is completely free.
• I’m astounded that it is, as it would be reasonable to charge users $10 to purchase this. I assume that Touch Surgery makes money by licensing it out to institutions to use for teaching and for the development of new operations

Room for Improvement

• When setting up my free account I was only asked to enter my password once, and couldn’t see the password to check I had typed it correctly. This has the potential to result in frustrated users who are locked out of their accounts due to password typos.
• All of the modules took a long time to download – potentially this was due to my internet connection but I downloaded via a fast wifi connection.
• I struggled to find out how to open and start new modules – when it looked like they were finally downloaded, the button to start them was missing. Was my account restricted in some way? If so, the app should make this clear.
• Another module that appeared to be downloaded told me there was an error with module when I tried to start it.

Overall

In spite of the technical glitches I experienced, I love this app. The graphics and design are among the best I’ve seen and there a great team of experienced healthcare professionals and developers behind this.

I seemed to have a lot of bad luck when using this app, however. I suspect some of the restrictions were due to pending verification of my account, but if this was made clearer in the app then it would be less frustrating for users.

The modules that I was able to complete were really helpful from an anatomy point of view, and also will be handy if I ever decide on a career change. I now feel pretty confident that I could do a carpal tunnel release without any supervision, so maybe I’ll look at surgical training next.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiWHXO5fAbA

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aULgS-jZ0Y

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