Force Feedback Control Assisted Tympanostomy Tube Insertion

Abstract

Otitis media with effusion (OME) is a common ear disease affecting children and adults all over the world. After medication as the first treatment fails, the tympanostomy tube insertion is the frequently performed otologic surgical procedure to treat OME. During the surgery, an incision is made on the tympanic membrane first and followed by the tube insertion through the incision on the eardrum. To overcome the disadvantages of the current surgical treatment for OME, an office-based surgical device suitable for patients with OME is developed and introduced in this paper. Since the tube insertion is the key to success in this surgery, it is necessary to ensure that the procedure is carried out in a quick and safe manner with a high success rate via the proposed surgical device. Moreover, the insertion time should be as short as possible so that the discomfort on the patient can be minimized. To this end, a control scheme with a new insertion method using force feedback is proposed, implemented, and tested in a mock-up system. The experimental results show that the proposed insertion method can achieve better performance on tube insertion than a pure motion controller or a pure force feedback controller. The success rate of the proposed insertion method is close to 100% and the insertion time is less than 0.19 s while it is carried out on a stable setup.