haptic sleeve

The haptic sleeve project was completed by myself and a team of 3 students for the Medical Robotics course at Boston University with the aim to provide haptic and visual feedback to a surgeon performing surgery at low cost with portability and comfort.

This work was covered in Boston University’s BU Today. Read more here!

It involved the development of a low-cost sleeve providing feedback to the wearer via an inflatable pouch for haptic feedback on the arm, and an LED indicator for visual feedback. The system aimed to provide surgeons an indication of how much force is being applied on sensitive tissue during minimally invasive surgery. This was accomplished by introducing force feedback in the form of a pneumatically actuated haptic sleeve and an LED visual indicator in line of sight. A simple control system was implemented, triggering a pump and inflating the sleeve to a pressure value mapped to a force value on a force-sensitive resistor that could be placed on a surgical tool interacting with sensitive tissue.

Outfitting a grasper tool with the force-sensitive resistor, a pick and place task was performed with and without the feedback device. Each test was performed three times, and on average the trials with haptic feedback showed less force applied on the ball used for pick and place.

Future work could include testing with a smaller force sensitive resistor on a real surgical tool with a simulated tissue made from silicone elastomer to obtain a better understanding of the usefulness of the device.