Touchless Control in the OR

In a sterile field, the interface is a liability. The moment a scrubbed clinician needs to reach a keyboard, a mouse, or a touchscreen, someone has to break scrub, or a circulating nurse becomes a human remote control, relaying "scroll down, no, back up" across the room. Neither is good, and both cost time when time matters.

Touchless gesture control removes the surface from the interaction. With AirTouch, a clinician interacts with imaging, records, and displays using hand gestures read by a standard camera, without touching anything that would compromise sterility. Point, pinch, and swipe replace the shared keyboard and the smudged panel.

Why touchless fits the sterile workflow

• Nothing to touch. No shared surface enters the sterile field, so there's nothing to contaminate and nothing to wipe down mid-procedure.

• Nothing to don or doff. Unlike a headset, there's no device to put on and sanitize between users. The camera watches; the hands work.

• Gloved hands, tough light. The models are trained for gloved hands, including colored surgical gloves, and for imperfect lighting, within reason. Some setups may call for a specialized camera, which we'll assess with you rather than promise blindly.

Built for intent, not just motion

An operating room is full of hands that aren't trying to control anything. AirTouch's patented intent detection is designed to act on deliberate gestures and filter out incidental movement, so the display responds to the clinician who means to drive it. That reliability is the difference between a lab demo and something a team will actually trust in a procedure.

We're careful here: AirTouch is an interface, not a medical device claim. What we can say plainly is that removing the touch surface removes a source of contamination and a workflow interruption. That's the job.

Is AirTouch a medical device?

AirTouch is computer input software. It turns gestures into the mouse, keyboard, and touch input a PACS viewer, EHR, or imaging workstation already accepts, and it makes no changes to the clinical systems it controls. That framing keeps it inside your existing IT and compliance review rather than a device evaluation, and we support that review when you run it. Details for imaging teams are on our PACS and medical imaging page.

Does hand tracking work with surgical gloves?

Gloved hands track on a standard RGB camera because the models read hand shape rather than skin. For colored surgical gloves, the Support Color Glove setting (off by default; blue, purple, and green) improves tracking under OR lighting in most setups, and our advanced settings tutorial walks through turning it on. Some rooms may still call for a specialized camera, which we assess with you.

See how it maps to clinical settings on our medical and sterile environments page, or start a free trial.

Related: gesture control and hand tracking software and medical and sterile environments.