Performance of Skin Stretch Haptic Feedback Augmentation for Laparoscopic Surgery in a Realistic Palpation Task
Résumé
Surgeons performing laparoscopic surgery face challenges in accurately evaluating tissue stiffness, attributable primarily to the degraded haptic perception of forces. Previous work demonstrated that sensory augmentation based on tangential skin stretch rendering tooltip forces improved stiffness discrimination for limited simulated tasks. In this work, we propose extending these results to a scenario closer to a clinical context. Fourteen novice participants were tasked with discriminating the stiffness of tissue phantoms within a realistic setup. Results showed that the proposed feedback significantly improved stiffness perception without impacting the cognitive load and was perceived as more predictable. The results confirm the value of skin-stretch haptic feedback to augment the force information in minimally invasive surgery.