The Invisible Work of Robotic Surgery: How Specialists Support, Shoulder, and Sustain Human-Robot Collaboration
PUBLICATION DATE: 6 June, 2026 PUBLICATION AUTHOR/S: Jasper T Vermeulen, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Müge Belek Fialho Teixeira, Alan G Burden, Matthias GuertlerPublished in DIS ’26: Proceedings of the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in surgery is often framed as a dyadic interaction between a surgeon and a robot. Such a focus on interactivity can narrow analytic attention, sidelining the often unseen coordination that makes robotic surgery workable across the wider surgical team. We surface the everyday practices of the Mako Product Specialist (MPS), a vendor-mandated support role embedded in Mako-assisted robotic surgeries.
Drawing on ten expert interviews, supplemented by in-theatre observations, we identify three categories of specialist work: Supporting Makoplasty, Shouldering Makoplasty, and Sustaining Makoplasty. Across these categories, we show how specialist mediation sustains co-located surgical HRC through articulation work, boundary work, and translation-and-repair work that stabilises tempo, maintains legibility, and enables breakdown recovery under sterile and infrastructural constraints. These findings extend ensemble accounts of surgical HRC and motivate the design of robotic systems for ensembles rather than a single primary user.
RELATED PROGRAM/S:Designing Socio-technical Robotic Systems RELATED PROJECT/S:
Project 3.1: Human Factors in collaborative robotics Publication link
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