Touchless Control in the OR | Neural Lab

Touchless Control in the OR

Jul 12, 2026

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.

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