The HARMS-Lab Human-Centred Paradigm

The HARMS lab employs Patient- and Surgeon-specific approaches, Perceptually-Enabled Methodologies and Frugal Innovation through Human-Centred Design to deliver enabling and disruptive solutions in the areas of Monitoring, Automation and Robotics for Surgery. Our Human-Centred paradigm starts with the people we are designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailored to suit their needs. The people we are designing for are primarily the Patient and the Surgeon, but of equal importance are the Health Provider, the Tax Payer and the Nurse.

Our Human-Centred paradigm is based on the following first principles:

• Patient- and surgeon-specific methodologies with the aim to minimize and eventually eliminate invasiveness, optimise outcome, improve ergonomics and promote personalisation.
• Frugal innovation to provide affordable robotic surgery capabilities, allow infrastructure re-purposing and negligible theatre footprint.
• Perceptually-enabled functionalities to improve ergonomics, reduce mental fatigue, facilitate automation and increase safety in the operating theatre.

The HARMS Lab Human-Centred paradigm

We aim to:

• Develop enabling technologies that introduce radical change, augment performance and capabilities by making robotic surgery attainable and accessible.
• Introduce disruptive innovation that pushes the boundaries by proposing new paradigms in minimally invasive surgery.
• Deliver solutions that are open to adoption and adaptation to a wide range of applications, in and out of clinical settings.

A significant part of the HARMS Lab work stems from the desire to disrupt the oligarchical status quo of the robotic surgery market, democratise and accelerate robotic surgery adoption. This will be achieved by giving smaller hospitals and poorer health systems the opportunity to adopt robotic technology or even develop it and customize it in-house.