Towards telementoring for needle insertion

This thesis presents a telementoring haptic system that aims to achieve online, bidirectional interaction between a medical mentor and a medical trainee during needle insertion training. The system can be seen as the integration of two modes of haptic feedback: (i) kinetic feedback which informs the mentor of the trainee's insertion forces and (ii) tactile feedback which guides a trainee along an insertion path according to the mentor's recommended motions. In our first experiment, addressing (i), we evaluated five forms of feedback with respect to trainee-force classification determined by the mentor. Our system adopts haptic plus visual feedback as it yielded the highest median accuracy (100%). In the second experiment, addressing (ii), we tested the efficacy of a tactile guidance sleeve in comparison to traditional verbal guidance. The current design of the sleeve was shown to be less intuitive than verbal guidance. We formed educated hypotheses about possible improvements to the sleeve and discuss lessons learned about tactile feedback applied to guidance in medical tasks.