Haptic Surgical Simulator for Robot‐Assisted Femur‐Fracture Surgery: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Effective preparation is essential before deploying robot‐assisted surgery (RAS) in the operating room (OR). Methods In this study, we present the Robossis surgical simulator (RSS), a haptic, fluoroscopy‐guided simulator designed for femur‐fracture surgery. Twenty medical students were randomly assigned to either the virtual reality (VR) head‐mounted display (HMD) or non‐VR (i.e., on‐screen) groups. Results Both groups showed significant pre‐to‐post gains across metrics ( p < 0.05), with shorter times (on‐screen ≈ −39%, HMD‐VR ≈ −40%), improved accuracy (on‐screen ≈ −77%; HMD‐VR ≈ −52%), reduced path length (on‐screen ≈ −44%; HMD‐VR ≈ −46%), and fewer collisions (on‐screen ≈ −55%; HMD‐VR ≈ −63%). Workload decreased for most domains in both groups; physical demand did not change significantly in the on‐screen group ( p = 0.1821). In the between‐group post‐training, the only difference was in translational accuracy ( p = 0.041) for the on‐screen group. Conclusion These findings highlight the learning curve associated with VR training for RAS.