A Haptic Feedback Glove for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Abstract

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has countless benefits over open surgery, from shorter re- covery times and lower risk procedures for the patient to higher accuracy and broader capabilities for the surgeon [1]. However, a significant detriment to these procedures is that current systems lack haptic feedback. The lack of haptic feedback in MIS forces the surgeon to depend merely on visual cues, such as the deformation of tissue under load, to estimate the forces [1]. The likely outcome of misreading these cues is torn tissue, patient discomfort or broken sutures [2]. Moreover, haptic feed- back is specifically vital for robot-assisted endoscopy procedures. A recent study evaluating an Endoscopic Operation Robot (EOR) concluded that haptic feedback is beneficial in remote manipulation of flexible endo- scopes. When haptic feedback was absent there were more incidences of overstretching of sigmoid colon in a colonoscopy training model [3]. This work presents a soft robotic glove that provides haptic feedback for endoscopic procedures (Fig. 1, A). In our previous work, we introduced a soft robotic sleeve [4] that can detect forces between a colonoscope and colon walls during navigation. The glove receives force input from the soft robotic sleeve wrapped around the colonoscope (Fig. 1, B). Any incident force on the sleeve, during endoscopic navigation, is relayed to the surgeon as haptic feedback through proportional inflation of the glove’s pneumatic actuators.