Developing the ‘Ouch-o-Meter’ to Teach Safe and Effective Use of Pressure for Palpation

A Comparative Study of Haptic Stiffness Identification by Veterinarians and Students

“…4), which suggests that unlike our previous study [15], veterinarians did not use a consistent domain-specific assumption about the surface they were feeling that affected the force they used. In the previous study, the veterinarians were told to assume that the virtual surfaces of different stiffness levels represented different clinical cases (stages of bovine pregnancy).…”

“…This, however, was not treated as an error trial; the trial continued and the participant responded to the stiffness presented. In our previous study [15] in which veterinarians palpated virtual surfaces representing three different stages of bovine pregnancy, the maximum force used did not exceed 5 N. The median peak force ranged between 1.62 N and 2.48 N depending on the stage of gestation.…”

“…Since it was previously shown that for veterinarians the stiffness of a surface can affect motor strategy [15], the recordings were first grouped by stiffness level. In this way, the analysis could account for potentially different strategies used for different stiffness levels.…”

“…However, several studies have also suggested that, at least within the range of "natural movements," people may be able to ignore the sensory input due to their own motor output [13] and that perception can remain unaffected by changes in hand movements [14]. To make the matter more complicated, our earlier studies have indicated that veterinarians often produce considerably different displacement and force magnitude patterns depending on the type and/or the stiffness of the object being palpated [15]. It is conceivable that veterinarians might bring this domain knowledge, as well as their own personal styles, to the task of palpating a surface, even when no clinical context is provided.…”