Abstract

Extended Reality (XR) technology offers promising results to support skill training. In the field of surgical education, Virtual Reality (VR) has long been explored, showing the potential to foster improved skill development and learning. However, XR in this domain is still underinvestigated, and there is a lack of design knowledge, design methods, and guidelines to inform how to best design XR experiences for effective surgical training. Here, we focus on suture training and show how participatory embodied design activities with experienced surgeons can help open the design space and arrive at interesting design solutions. We report on a hybrid bodystorming combining physical props with XR headsets with passthrough capabilities, supporting rich embodied explorations, a better understanding and articulation of key steps of suturing, uncovering essential design requirements and features, and arriving at an interesting design concept proposal that can be inspiring for future works in the domain.