Robotically-assisted surgeries are a relatively new way of performing surgeries at the Department of Urology at Aalborg Hospital. While robotically-assisted surgeries give better quality surgeries, they take longer time to conduct than traditional surgeries. Therefore the department would like to speed up the surgeries to diminish this issue. To help them attain this goal, we developed prototypes for collecting data from surgeries to be used in analyses in regards to time efficiency, quality of the surgery and for educational purposes. We developed these prototypes using a highly innovative software process based on the Essence framework. Through this case we have researched how prototyping supports the Essence framework by enhancing the way in which we, as designers, organically and evolutionarily learn, discover, generate and refine designs through the use of prototypes.

We introduce the concepts of a Surrogate Challenger and Surrogate Users as proxy users to support the development process when the customer is not able to supply neither an on-site customer nor tests subjects. The Surrogate Challenger act as on-site customer who is able to participate on-site in daily discussions and evaluations when the real on-site customer is unavailable.

The Surrogate Users acts as test subjects who are able to participate in frequents and simple tests of developed prototypes. To somewhat minimize the gap of knowledge between the Surrogate Users and real users, we introduce the concept of mapping problems of one domain to another. We show how we are able to map a problem of the surgeon during surgeries to a problem solvable by the Surrogate Users during tests.

This master thesis describes our process, research, and the ideas and prototypes developed and demonstrated to the Department of Urology.