Abstract
During open surgery, a surgeon relies not only on the detailed view of the organ being operated upon and on being able to feel the fine details of this organ but also heavily relies on the combination of these two senses. In laparoscopic surgery, haptic feedback provides surgeons information on interaction forces between instrument and tissue. There have been many studies to mimic the haptic feedback in laparoscopic-related telerobotics studies to date. However, cutaneous feedback is mostly restricted or limited in haptic feedback-based minimally invasive studies. We argue that fine-grained information is needed in laparoscopic surgeries to study the details of the instrument’s end and can convey via cutaneous feedback. We propose an exoskeleton haptic hand wearable which consists of five 4 × 4 miniaturized fingertip actuators, 80 in total, to convey cutaneous feedback. The wearable is described as modular, lightweight, Bluetooth, and WiFi-enabled, and has a maximum power consumption of 830 mW. Software is developed to demonstrate rapid tactile actuation of edges; this allows the user to feel the contours in cutaneous feedback. Moreover, to demonstrate the idea as an object displayed on a flat monitor, initial tests were carried out in 2D. In the second phase, the wearable exoskeleton glove is then further developed to feel 3D virtual objects by using a virtual reality (VR) headset demonstrated by a VR environment. Two-dimensional and 3D objects were tested by our novel untethered haptic hand wearable. Our results show that untethered humans understand actuation in cutaneous feedback just in a single tapping with 92.22% accuracy. Our wearable has an average latency of 46.5 ms, which is much less than the 600 ms tolerable delay acceptable by a surgeon in teleoperation. Therefore, we suggest our untethered hand wearable to enhance multimodal perception in minimally invasive surgeries to naturally feel the immediate environments of the instruments.
Highlights
There has been a rapid increase in the multidisciplinary study of haptics in the last two decades among psychophysics, experimental psychologists, and engineers in the field of mechanical design, electronics, automation, and computer science [1]
A more recent application-based review of haptics technology was published by Giri et al in 2021, in which they classified the application of haptic devices based on construction, functionality in various fields, prospects, and major limitations related to haptics technology [3]
If the small section of the tactile matrix simulator is more than 50% black, it will be filled with the color green, and an “on” or “up” signal is sent by the microcontroller to the assigned tactile pin
Summary
There has been a rapid increase in the multidisciplinary study of haptics in the last two decades among psychophysics, experimental psychologists, and engineers in the field of mechanical design, electronics, automation, and computer science [1]. In 2007, King et al [42] demonstrated a tactile matrix display in the form of a 3 × 2 pneumatic balloon actuator array that can be used as cutaneous haptic feedback for surgical robotic tools. To the best of our knowledge, our prototype has the novelty of having the highest number of tactile feedback actuators in an untethered, portable, open-palm haptic glove design that can fit any size of hand because of its flexibility and adjustability. It is made from commercially available dot Braille cells [55].
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