Touch Surgery Game: a 3D simulator for walking through operations

Touch Surgery is a 3D simulation for surgeons and medical students. Kinosis built it for iOS and Android, and four surgeons who shared an interest in teaching formed the London company. By mid-2014 the app counted more than 100,000 downloads.

The design rests on Cognitive Task Simulation. An operation is broken into fundamental steps and decision points, and the player performs each step on screen. Jean Nehme, the CEO and co-founder, said the app followed the principle that surgical performance depends 75 percent on cognitive skills such as pattern recognition and decision making, and 25 percent on technical ability. The company called it the first cognitive task simulator for surgery.

Each operation has two modes. Learn gives step-by-step instructions, and the player drags a finger across the screen to complete each action while 3D animations show the result. Test removes the instructions, scores the run and posts the score to a leaderboard.

Nehme argued that decision making is taught only indirectly in most surgical training programs, where trainees pick it up by watching and repeating. Research cited by the team showed that breaking an operation into individual steps and decision points can greatly improve understanding and retention. The method is called Cognitive Task Analysis, and Touch Surgery turned it into an interactive visual format.

The library held almost 30 procedures. They included breast reconstruction surgery, open appendectomy, emergency leg fasciotomy, knee arthroscopy, carpal tunnel release, tendon repair, cemented hip cup, total knee arthroplasty and trochanteric wiring. The team worked with surgeons and institutions to check content accuracy.

WIRED held its first health conference on April 29 at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London, with more than 300 scientists, entrepreneurs and medical pioneers. Touch Surgery appeared on the startup stage. A medical student channel described it as possibly the best new app for students heading toward surgery, and noted that it was free.

Touch Surgery now sits under Medtronic. A Medtronic page marked with a 2026 copyright describes Touch Surgery as an ecosystem for recording, accessing and analyzing surgical video, and mentions "our free to use app of surgical scenarios across multiple specialties." The page does not give a count of procedures.

The touchsurgery.com address itself shows no readable description of the app in November 2026. The Medtronic page is the clearest statement that the Touch Surgery game still exists as a free app. Anyone looking for the 2014 procedure list or the leaderboard should check the app store listing for their device.