Little is known about perioperative stress responses and possible anxiety mitigating factors
like audiovisual aids or IV sedation. Most studies use surrogate markers and retrospective
questionnaires, and are not based on real-time gathered data. Skin conductance measurements
allow the sympathetic discharge to be evaluated down to fractions of a second and enable us
to continuously monitor stress responses as skin conductance responses/per second during the
perioperative management. In our study, the investigators propose to examine the effect of
personal audiovisual equipment (audio/video goggles) on perioperative stress, pain, and
overall experience in patients undergoing ambulatory meniscectomy under spinal anesthesia.
Patients will be randomly assigned to either receive traditional sedation or light sedation
in addition to audiovisual equipment. The investigators hope to determine outcome estimates
of the use of this equipment on stress levels using skin conductance measurements, request
for further sedation, postoperative pain levels and analgesic consumption, time to discharge
readiness, and overall patient satisfaction, and collect thus far unavailable data on the
stress response to perioperative stresses (such as IV insertion and spinal placement) in
order to allow for power analyses for future studies.