A novel Diagnostician Haptic Interface for Tele-palpation

The shortage of specialist caused by the increased need for medical examinations has stimulated the application of robotics technologies to telemedicine. For some of the most common medical examinations such as ultrasonography and palpation, doctors exploit haptic feedback to formulate a diagnosis. This is especially true for palpation, where haptic feedback plays the biggest role. In this paper, we present a novel 3-Degrees-of-Freedom (DoFs) robotic interface which is designed to be integrated into a telepalpation system. In particular, this haptic interface is the master of a teleoperation loop in which the slave operates on the patient. Therefore, its design allows the doctor to explore the whole patient's abdomen while providing the doctor with a haptic feedback when in contact with the patient. A preliminary assessment of the interface is also presented: three participants were asked to detect the presence and the size of a sphere without visual clues. Results show that the interface is suitable for the application in remote palpation.