Toward new designs of haptic devices for minimally invasive surgery

TLDR: The design and development experiences that a group of us at Simon Fraser University has gained during the past 7 years are presented, including evolutionary designs from the one degree of freedom haptic feedback design to more complex four degrees of freedom.

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the design and development of electromechanical haptic devices that can be used as a part of the training environment of laparoscopic surgeons (minimally invasive surgery, MIS). The paper first presents results of the experimental study of measuring the expected forces that the user hand can experience when using long stem surgical tools that are used in laparoscopic surgery. In general and in performing laparoscopic procedures, the user can feel reaction forces arising from the interaction of the surgical tools with the organs along four dominant directions and also to some extent between the palm and the fingers of the hand. Design challenges are to develop a high-bandwidth system which allows the creation of such a force feedback along the desired degrees of freedom. This paper presents the design and development experiences that a group of us at Simon Fraser University has gained during the past 7 years. We present evolutionary designs from the one degree of freedom haptic feedback design to more complex four degrees of freedom. Some comparisons have also been made between the proposed design and commercially available ones.