According to the experiments by the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Centre team, playing some Wii games improve surgeons’ performance. The study pitted a group of eight trainee surgeons, who spent one hour on the Wii, against normal trainees in a surgery virtual reality simulator. However, only a few games help this:
According to researcher Kanav Kohel, only games that require delicate, small and precise movements work for surgery training. They used Marble Mania, which gets the player to control a ball over a 3D maze.
The Banner Good Samaritan Medical Centre study concluded that a cheap Wii could be an excellent substitute to enhance surgery skills in poor countries with no access to virtual simulators. The results of their research supports this conclusion: the Wii-enhanced group scored 50% better than the others. [BBC]
