Affordable interactive virtual reality system for the Dynamic Hip Screw surgery training in vitro

Interactive virtual reality systems provide safe and cost-effective training environment to improve the technical skills and competence of surgeons. The trainees can have as many practice sessions, without need to the trainer all the time, before even start carrying out the procedure on any real patient. In this paper, we present an affordable interactive virtual reality system for the Dynamic Hip Screw (DHS) surgery training in vitro, through 3D tracking. The system facilitates a safe (in vitro / off patient) training to improve the cognitive coordination of trainees and junior surgeons, in particular the Hands, Eyes and Brain coordination. The system is based on very cheap commercial off-the-shelf (COT) components, which are very affordable, and needs minimum setup effort and knowledge. It also provides a range of visual and quantitative feedback information and measures, such as position, orientation, insertion point, and depth of drilling. It is envisaged that improving this level of coordination, through the training system, will contribute to reducing the failure rate of the DHS procedure. This means better treatment for patients and less costs for the Health services systems (e.g. UK's NHS system)

Hybrid Modelling for Vineyard Harvesting Operations

Hiring workers under seasonal recruiting contracts causes significant variation of workers skills in the vineyards. This leads to inconsistent workers performance, reduction in harvesting efficiency, and increasing in grape losses rates. The objective of this research is to investigate how the variation in workers experience could impact vineyard harvesting productivity and operational cost. The complexity of the problem means that it is difficult to analyze the system parameters and their relationships using individual analytical model. Hence, a hybrid model integrating discrete event simulation (DES) and agent based modeling (ABM) is developed and applied on a vineyard to achieve research objective. DES models harvesting operation and simulates process performance, while ABM addresses the seasonal workers heterogeneous characteristics, particularly experience variations and disparity of working days in the vineyard. The model is used to evaluate two seasonal recruiting policies against vineyard productivity, grape losses quantities, and total operational cost