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Use Of Vibrotactile Feedback And Stochastic Resonance For Improving Laparoscopic Surgery Performance, Robert Douglas Hoskins

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Vibrotactile feedback, used as sensory substitution for loss of haptic feedback, has been utilized to improve performance in manual control, teleoperation and during minimally invasive surgical tasks. Stochastic resonance (SR), introduced into the human control system as white noise at a sub-threshold level, has shown promise to improve the sensitivity of tactile receptors resulting in enhancement of performance for a variety of manual tracking and sensorimotor tasks. The purpose of this study was to determine if SR could improve performance (accuracy, speed) in a simulated laparoscopic palpation task and to compare it to vibrotactile feedback (VIB). It was hypothesized that …