Surgical and Healthcare-Worker Neuroergonomics

Healthcare is among the most cognitively demanding and high-stakes forms of skilled work. Surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses, intensive-care and emergency staff, and trainees must sustain attention, integrate complex information, make rapid decisions, and perform precise motor actions, often under time pressure, interruption, and fatigue. The consequences of momentary lapses can be severe for patients and clinicians alike. Neuroergonomics offers a powerful lens on these demands by measuring the brain and body at work, using electroencephalography, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, eye tracking, pupillometry, and wearable sensing to quantify the cognitive and physiological states of healthcare workers during real and simulated clinical tasks.Interest in this area has grown rapidly, driven by the maturation of mobile neuroimaging, the spread of surgical simulation and robotic platforms, and mounting concern about clinician workload, fatigue, and burnout. Studies now use neurophysiological measures to track mental workload during laparoscopic and robotic surgery, to chart skill acquisition and the transition from novice to expert, to detect fatigue and stress across shifts, and to examine situational awareness and team cognition in the operating room and beyond. Yet important challenges remain. Translating findings from the laboratory and simulator to the live clinical environment introduces movement, noise, and workflow constraints that established methods were not designed to handle. Individual differences, small and heterogeneous samples, and a lack of shared measures and reporting standards make results difficult to compare across teams and settings. Linking neural and physiological markers to objective performance and to patient outcomes, and turning those markers into real-time or adaptive support, are open problems central to the field.This Research Topic aims to bring together work that advances the measurement, understanding, and application of neuroergonomics to healthcare workers across surgical, procedural, ward, and prehospital settings. By spanning neural, physiological, behavioural, and organisational perspectives, this collection seeks to clarify how clinical work shapes cognitive and physiological state, how expertise develops, and how monitoring can support training, performance, safety, and clinician wellbeing.We welcome submissions presenting empirical studies, methodological advances, validation work, and critical reviews. Contributions that introduce neural or physiological markers, workload and skill assessment methods, real-time monitoring approaches, or design and training interventions are encouraged, as are studies that bridge simulation and live clinical practice, address individual differences, or connect neurophysiological measures to performance and patient outcomes. Papers introducing openly available datasets, benchmarks, or reproducible protocols are particularly welcome.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Neural and physiological assessment of cognitive workload in surgery and other clinical tasks• Skill acquisition, expertise development, and novice-to-expert transitions in surgical and procedural training• Mental fatigue, stress, and burnout across shifts, and their neural and physiological signatures• Situational awareness, attention, and decision-making in the operating room and acute-care settings• Team cognition, shared mental models, and interpersonal coordination in clinical teams• fNIRS, EEG, eye tracking, heart rate variability, and multimodal monitoring of clinicians at work• Simulation-based training and competency assessment informed by neurophysiological measures• Ergonomics and cognitive demands of robotic, laparoscopic, and image-guided surgery• Real-time and adaptive systems that respond to clinician workload or fatigue• Individual differences, calibration, and generalisation across clinicians, tasks, and settings• Linking neural and physiological markers to clinical performance, error, and patient outcomes• Standardised measures, benchmarks, and reproducible protocols for healthcare-worker neuroergonomics Topic editors: Zefferino Rossini, Roisin T Dolan Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83738/surgical-and-healthcare-worker-neuroergonomics