Haptic Glove and Platform with Gestural Control For Neuromorphic Tactile Sensory Feedback In Medical Telepresence †

Abstract

Advancements in the study of the human sense of touch are fueling the field of haptics. This is paving the way for augmenting sensory perception during object palpation in tele-surgery and reproducing the sensed information through tactile feedback. Here, we present a novel tele-palpation apparatus that enables the user to detect nodules with various distinct stiffness buried in an ad-hoc polymeric phantom. The contact force measured by the platform was encoded using a neuromorphic model and reproduced on the index fingertip of a remote user through a haptic glove embedding a piezoelectric disk. We assessed the effectiveness of this feedback in allowing nodule identification under two experimental conditions of real-time telepresence: In Line of Sight (ILS), where the platform was placed in the visible range of a user; and the more demanding Not In Line of Sight (NILS), with the platform and the user being 50 km apart. We found that the entailed percentage of identification was higher for stiffer inclusions with respect to the softer ones (average of 74% within the duration of the task), in both telepresence conditions evaluated. These promising results call for further exploration of tactile augmentation technology for telepresence in medical interventions.

A Mechatronic Platform for Computer Aided Detection of Nodules in Anatomopathological Analyses via Stiffness and Ultrasound Measurements

“…After this validation step, we can envisage that the sensorized platform placed in the operating theatre will enable the pathologist to access data remotely with the purpose of assisting the surgeon in adapting the procedures during surgery. Information obtained from the platform can also be used to provide haptic feedback to the pathologist by means of wearable interfaces [35,36,37,38]. The analysis of vision data, now used only for detecting the boundary of the tissue and thus to define the indentation matrix, can be improved to provide a visual report too.…”

Proposal of the Tactile Glove Device

“…Some works have a variety of ways to capture movements. In [23] a camera is used to detect the movement of the fingers, already in [24] a device called LeapMotion is used to capture the movement of the hand and arm. In the same context, the paper presented in [25] shows a rehabilitation system using a virtual reality system with sensory, visual, and auditory feedback.…”

Neuromorphic tactile sensor array based on fiber Bragg gratings to encode object qualities

“…The value of S was so chosen that all the neurons spike for every trial while staying below the saturation of the neuron model during rest phases. All the other constants are the same as our previous works [8]. Two replicas of this neuron model (N1 and N2 in Figure 6) were chosen to independently provide inputs to the currents, , from two FBGs.…”

“…Neuromorphic systems aim at mimicking the structural and functional characteristics of the neuronal networks using asynchronous event-driven spiking networks, and several biological systems provided a relevant source of inspiration, including the retinal [3], cochlear [4] and mechanoreceptive [5,6] neuronal architecture. Along this research stream, we addressed tactile neuromorphic systems with applications towards neuro-prosthetics [5], neurorobotics [7] and telepresence [8]. Indeed, tactile information is mediated by four types of functional units present in the cutaneous tissue (Merkel and Ruffini, which are slowly adapting, and Meissner and Pacinian, fast adapting), and human fingertips are innervated by largest amount of these mechanoreceptor organs extending into nerve fibers, which carry spiking information corresponding to tactile stimuli experienced by their respective receptive fields [9].…”