Designing for usability: development and evaluation of a portable minimally-actuated haptic hand and forearm trainer for unsupervised stroke rehabilitation

In stroke rehabilitation, simple robotic devices hold the potential to increase the training dosage in group therapies and to enable continued therapy at home after hospital discharge. However, we identified a lack of portable and cost-effective devices that not only focus on improving motor functions but also address sensory deficits. Thus, we...

Design And Evaluation Of A Balanced Compliant Laparoscopic Grasper

In laparoscopic surgery, quality of haptic feedback is reduced compared to conventional surgery, leading to unintentional tissue damage during grasping. From the perspective of haptics, poor mechanical design of laparoscopic instrument joints induces friction and a nonlinear actuation-tip force relation. In this study, a novel laparoscopic...

Active vision via extremum seeking for robots in unstructured environments: Applications in object recognition and manipulation

In this paper, a novel active vision strategy is proposed for optimizing the viewpoint of a robot's vision sensor for a given success criterion. The strategy is based on extremum seeking control (ESC), which introduces two main advantages: 1) Our approach is model free: It does not require an explicit objective function or any other task...

Effect of laparoscopic grasper force transmission ratio on grasp control

Background- Surgeons may cause tissue damage by incorrect laparoscopic pinch force control. Unpredictable tissue and grasper properties may cause slips or ruptures. This study investigated how different forms of haptic feedback influence the surgeon’s ability to generate a safe laparoscopic grasp while pulling tissues of variable stiffness using...