RH
R. Horeman
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Robotic-assisted minimally-invasive surgery offers many clinical and ergonomic advantages, however, it also adds a sensory obstacle between the surgeon and the rest of the operating room (OR), limiting their awareness of ongoing issues. The surgeon’s visual and auditory channels are often overloaded during procedures, motivating the need to explore haptics as an alternative communication channel. This study presents the design and validation of a wearable vibrotactile interface, created to unobtrusively communicate OR alerts to a surgeon without interfering with their primary surgical task. A structured design methodology was followed, including requirement definition, concept generation through a morphological chart, systematic concept selection and development of a final design. The manufactured prototype consisted of a waist-mounted haptic belt, housing a 3 × 4 grid of wirelessly controlled vibration motors. Five distinct vibration patterns were designed using spatial and temporal encoding to represent recurrent OR issues. The prototype was validated in a user study involving 10 participants. The experiment was divided into two sections: an isolated pattern recognition task, involving only the haptic belt, and a combined task, pairing the belt with a robotic laparoscopic trainer (AdLap). The combined task was performed through a cross-over study, in which half of the participants started with experimental runs interrupted by haptic alerts, while the other half started with runs without alerts. Standalone recognition accuracy reached 99.3%, while combined-task accuracy remained high at 96.0%. Additionally, the alerts did not significantly degrade the primary surgical task performance. The results show that vibrotactile feedback can be used effectively to communicate OR information during robotic-assisted surgery. Therefore, the haptic belt represents a feasible solution to improve surgeon situational awareness, with potential for future clinical integration.
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Robotic-assisted minimally-invasive surgery offers many clinical and ergonomic advantages, however, it also adds a sensory obstacle between the surgeon and the rest of the operating room (OR), limiting their awareness of ongoing issues. The surgeon’s visual and auditory channels are often overloaded during procedures, motivating the need to explore haptics as an alternative communication channel. This study presents the design and validation of a wearable vibrotactile interface, created to unobtrusively communicate OR alerts to a surgeon without interfering with their primary surgical task. A structured design methodology was followed, including requirement definition, concept generation through a morphological chart, systematic concept selection and development of a final design. The manufactured prototype consisted of a waist-mounted haptic belt, housing a 3 × 4 grid of wirelessly controlled vibration motors. Five distinct vibration patterns were designed using spatial and temporal encoding to represent recurrent OR issues. The prototype was validated in a user study involving 10 participants. The experiment was divided into two sections: an isolated pattern recognition task, involving only the haptic belt, and a combined task, pairing the belt with a robotic laparoscopic trainer (AdLap). The combined task was performed through a cross-over study, in which half of the participants started with experimental runs interrupted by haptic alerts, while the other half started with runs without alerts. Standalone recognition accuracy reached 99.3%, while combined-task accuracy remained high at 96.0%. Additionally, the alerts did not significantly degrade the primary surgical task performance. The results show that vibrotactile feedback can be used effectively to communicate OR information during robotic-assisted surgery. Therefore, the haptic belt represents a feasible solution to improve surgeon situational awareness, with potential for future clinical integration.