Introduction: Mastering a surgical skill requires experience and repetition, yet opportunities for surgical trainees to gain real experience is variable and limited by case load. Surgical simulators have emerged to attempt to overcome these limitations. In Urology, few commercially available simulators exist. One that has seen limited adoption, the URO Mentor, has been validated in several studies. However, this system is expensive, at $60,000 USD, and is not portable. The goal of this work is to develop and validate a low-cost, portable endoscopic simulation system for training Urology residents.

Methods: We developed a system that simulates the experience of endoscopy in Urology. The system consists of a smartphone/tablet application (app) that displays an endoscopic camera view, and a wireless controller modelled like a real endoscope (Figure 1,2). The app is designed like a game, with sequential levels adding complexity to tasks that must be completed. This initial study focuses on face validation of the prototype. Post participation surverys were administred to urologic residents and staff a 5 point likert scale was used to evaluate simulator's realism and usefulness.

Results: Subjective scores were obtained relating to the look, feel, and physics of the system; and a global score rating the system’s perceived utility in increasing residents’ performance in real life. All users rated at least 4/5 in all domains of usefulness as a teaching tool and reasonable scores for realism (Figure 3,4)

Conclusions: We have created a portable endoscopic simulation system for training Urology residents. In this phase of our study, we obtained feedback that will inform the next iteration of the system. This validation is essential to the next phase, which will quantify the system’s ability to improve resident real world performance.