Human-centered design of a wearable kinesthetic haptic device for surgical teleoperation

This paper describes the design and performance evaluation of a flexible wearable haptic device that aims to realize full kinesthetic haptic feedback for application in robot-assisted surgery (RAS). Contrary to the existing practice, where the haptic feedback and leader—follower control are implemented in the same driver device, which leads to control instabilities at times, the proposed haptic device enables to achieve a separation between the haptic loop and the leader—follower control. This separation is expected to circumvent control instability issues faced by traditional haptic teleoperation systems and, therefore, safely achieve a full kinesthetic haptic experience for RAS. The proposed device can provide 3-D kinesthetic feedback (flexion–extension, abduction–adduction, and along the finger axis) to the operator’s fingertip. An open-loop force control has been implemented and the device performance is evaluated by displaying force in the above-mentioned directions. The results confirmed the feasibility of the design and control scheme with a mean absolute error of around \(16\%\) for flexion, \(4\%\) for extension, \(9\%\) for abduction–adduction, and \(7\%\) along the finger axis direction. In the future, the device will be integrated with a surgical robot to evaluate its performance in experimental surgical teleoperation.