Investigation into the effectiveness of vibrotactile feedback to improve the haptic realism of an arthroscopy training simulator.

A simulator with a custom developed haptic device named OrthoForce was developed at Imperial College for knee arthroscopy training. It is capable providing limited force bandwidth, which has shown to be suitable for the reproduction of moderately high In recent published works, it was found that high frequency vibrations (otherwise known as vibrotactile feedback), which occur when two objects come into contact (e.g. during tapping, stroking or puncturing) can be discriminated by the human tactile system. It is hypothesised that simulating vibrotactile feedback will improve the haptic realism of hard collisions. Thus, this paper presents the development of a hardware extension to the OrthoForce system, which is able to produce timed high frequency vibrations, and its effect on the simulated haptic realism as experienced by different user groups. Although limited in scope, preliminary results are encouraging.