Papers
19
Total Citations
636
H-Index
11
About
Denny Yu is a leading researcher at the intersection of human factors engineering, surgical robotics, and cognitive workload assessment. His work addresses one of the most pressing challenges in modern operating rooms: understanding and optimizing the mental and physical demands placed on surgeons during robot-assisted procedures. Yu has made landmark contributions by developing and validating objective, sensor-based methods to measure intraoperative workload, moving the field beyond subjective questionnaires toward real-time physiological and behavioral metrics — including eye-tracking, wearable motion sensors, and multimodal physiological signals. His research has demonstrated that these measures can predict perceived workload, track skill development across training sessions, and characterize ergonomic risk in both robotic and laparoscopic surgery. A particularly notable achievement is his co-authorship of the IDEAL framework for surgical robotics (143 citations), which provides a systematic structure for evaluating emerging surgical technologies. Yu has also pioneered adaptive human-robot interaction systems capable of autonomously responding to a surgeon's cognitive state in real time. With a body of work accumulating over 580 citations, his research is shaping the future of safer, smarter, and more human-centered surgical systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 6A comparison of laparoscopic and robotic ergonomic risk30 citations · 2022
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- 10SACHETS: Semi-Autonomous Cognitive Hybrid Emergency Teleoperated Suction13 citations · 2021