The Choreography of Care: An Ethnographic Study of Human-Robot Collaboration in Makoplasty Surgeries
PUBLICATION DATE: 4 April, 2026 PUBLICATION AUTHOR/S: Jasper Vermeulen, James Dwyer, Alan Burden, Glenda Caldwell, Müge Belek Fialho Teixeira, Matthias Guertler, and Ross CrawfordThis paper received an Honourable Mention Award, placing it in the top 5% of accepted CHI papers in 2026, a significant achievement at the premier conference in Human–Computer Interaction.
This paper examines human–robot collaboration (HRC) in orthopaedic surgery, focusing on joint replacement procedures performed with the Mako robotic system. Drawing on over 80 hours of hospital-based ethnographic fieldwork, including observations of 15 Makoplasty surgeries and 10 interviews, the study shows that surgical HRC is far more complex than a simple surgeon–robot pairing. Instead, collaboration unfolds as a multi-actor choreography, involving surgeons, nurses, robotic specialists, and the robot itself.
Through detailed vignettes, the paper highlights how surgical teams coordinate using tacit cues, negotiate boundaries of responsibility, and adapt their roles throughout different phases of an operation. It also reveals how responsibility shifts over time depending on task demands, underscoring the critical, and often invisible, role of supporting actors in maintaining surgical flow. The authors argue that understanding surgical HRC as a choreography, rather than a dyad, has important implications for the design of future co‑located surgical robotic systems that better support distributed collaboration.
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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