Pedicle Screw Insertion Surgical Simulator

Scoliosis is a sideway spinal deformity. If the curvature is measured to be more than 50 degrees, the patient can feel significant discomfort. In such cases, surgery is required to straighten the spine. Pedicle screw insertion is a common procedure for scoliosis surgery. The technique requires the placement of screws from the pedicle into the spine. A rod is used to connect all the pedicle screws. The spine is straightened during the connection process. One of the most common techniques used for pedicle screw insertion is called the free hand technique. During free hand surgery, the surgeon creates a screw channel by manually probe into the spine. The lack of visual aid requires the surgeon to rely strongly on haptics feedback. Due to the spine sensitivity and the limited operating range, small changes in force or direction can cause the probe to breach out of the spine. If the breach reaches the spine medial, the spinal cord could be damaged. Even experienced surgeons can not prevent breach. Studies have found that surgeons with 5 or more years of surgical experience have a breach rate of 10.8 %. In this thesis, pedicle screw insertion simulator is developed and examined in detail. The simulator combines visual and haptics sensation to recreate the channel creation process of the surgery. A 2DOF mechanical device is used for the haptics sensation. The device includes a linear actuator and a rotary motor. The simulator was tuned to four different surgical scenarios by 2 expert surgeons. The scenarios are soft probing, hard probing, lateral breach, and in-out-in breach. 10 additional surgeons were asked to participant in a clinical study. Measurements were collected for analysis. The focus of the study is to find if the surgeon can recognize the simulated breach scenarios. Four research questions were examined, and they are: 1. Can experience help the surgeon improve correct breach recognition rate? 2. Can experience help the surgeon improve overall correct recognition rate? 3. Is there any performance difference between surgeons with different experience level? 4. Can the simulation trials become a learning tool for the simulation tasks? Each question has its own null hypothesis and statistical analysis is used to determine if the null hypothesis is rejected. The main conclusion is that there is no statistically significant relationship between the wrong breach or total wrong recognition rate and surgical experience. Furthermore, there is statistically significant in hard probing scenario between surgical experience and vertical force variance. Lastly, ANOVA analysis showed that the breach force and velocity in three trials are close to statistically significant, more data may prove that the simulator can be a training tool for the tasks

The Benefits of Haptic Feedback in Mobile Phone Camera

Communication is basically the act of transferring information from one place to another. Feedback is a system where the reaction or response of the receiver arrives at the sender after he/she has interpreted the message. Feedback is inevitably essential to make two way communications effective. In fact, without feedback communication remains incomplete. At times, feedback could be verbal such as written and oral. Then in some cases, it could be nonverbal. Feedback is mainly a response from your audiences; it allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your message. In fact research shows that the majority of the messages that have been sent are nonverbal and the ability to understand and use nonverbal communication is powerful tools that will help people connect with each other. As well as communication where nonverbal shows much more impressive, a sense of touch as known as haptics plays an important role in our new phase of technology. It is the science of applying touch sensation and control to interaction with computer applications by using special input/output devices. It gives users a slight jolt of energy at the point of touch, providing instant sensory feedback, while reducing the audio, visual or audio-visual demand. Haptic technology is an evolutionary step into interacting with objects as an extension of our mind and allows for more socially appropriate and subtle interaction. In this thesis, the benefits of haptic feedback in a mobile phone camera are explored and compared to the existing feedback mechanisms. Discovering expectations from users and gathering ideas in order to improve user experience in haptic feedback of a mobile phone camera will be the main focus as well as to understand “What make end users to use or not to use mobile phone camera?” and “What qualities of haptics could be used in the design of the user interface for mobile phone camera?”. Depending on the settings and the quality of the mobile phones, the feedback from the camera can affect the user experience in many ways. I believe that to improve the existing feedback by applying haptic output such as a vibration or a vibrotactile signal may also considerably improve the user experience. Because haptic feedback is a new technology and proved to be efficient, to apply it to the mobile phone camera feedback should provide better support for users when compared to the existing feedback signals, which are audio and visual only. One of the main objectives was to analyze the users’ needs and expectations regarding the mobile phone camera haptic feedback and applications in various types of difficult situations and challenges users have encountered. Therefore, a user study was done at the beginning of the thesis work. Its aim was to get general results, which can be applied to haptic interaction on the mobile phone camera in order to improve existing applications and help easing users in their photo taking activities with their mobile phone camera. In addition, the results are considered to provide input for further studies as well as to offer concrete input to the development of a prototype