Touch Surgery is a must-see new app for medical students, surgeons and the curious

Surgery is a scary word for practically everyone. For medical professionals, though, it might also be a challenge to do your job in the best way possible.

But how do you train for a complicated surgery? There are simulator machines, but those are expensive, usually located in a medical facility, hard to access and often very limited. In searching for a better way to practise complicated medical interventions came Touch Surgery, a completely free and extremely detailed and well-made app for Android and iOS.

Touch Surgery features computer-generated graphics rather than video: of course, video would be the most realistic way of doing such an app, but it is often hard to see and properly understand a procedure in video. That's where Touch Surgery shines: it walks you through every single step of a surgery in a very accessible way and it shows you tissues in different colors, so that you can easily understand what's going on. We ourselves played around with the app and despite obviously not involved with surgery in any way, we found it to be tremendously informative for even a lay person.

FREE AND IMPRESSIVELY WELL MADE, A MUST-SEE

It takes away a lot of the scare and mystery that a patient might be experiencing: virtually walking through an upcoming surgery with the app allows you to better know what will happen to your body and prepare for it mentally.

Touch Surgery now has 1.5 million users across the globe, it's completely free to download and once you get the app, you can download one of over 75 procedures (they do require some space on your phone), also free of charge. This, however, is hardly the limit: the company plans to expand and grow that database furhther.

"We have made a huge amount of progress with our apps and over 1.5 million users worldwide. It means we already have the world’s largest digital surgical community. We are operating on a completely different scale to other surgical training solutions ... We have spent the last few years truly understanding surgical procedures – how they are done and how surgeons make decisions in the operating room," Touch Surgery co-founder Andre Chow explains. "Our goal is to step back into the operating room and apply our technology to aid the operative environment."