Towards finger motion tracking and analyses for cardiac surgery

Robot Assisted Surgery is attracting increasing amount of attention as it offers numerous benefits to patients as well as surgeons. Heart surgery requires a high level of precision and dexterity, in contrast to other surgical specialties. Robot assisted heart surgery is not as widely performed due to numerous reasons including a lack of appropriate and intuitive surgical interfaces to control minimally invasive surgical tools. In this paper, finger motion of the surgeon is analyzed during cardiac surgery tasks on an ex-vivo animal model with the purpose of designing a more intuitive master console. First, a custom finger tracking system is developed using IMU sensors, which is lightweight and comfortable enough to allow free movement of the surgeon’s fingers/hands while using instruments. The proposed system tracks finger joint angles and fingertip positions for three involved fingers (thumb, index, middle). Accuracy of the IMU sensors has been evaluated using an optical tracking system (Polaris, NDI). Finger motion of the cardiac surgeon while using a Castroviejo instrument is studied in suturing and knotting scenarios. The results show that PIP and MCP joints have larger Range Of Motion (ROM), and faster rate of change compared to other finger/thumb joints, while thumb has the largest Fingertip WorkSpace (FWS) of all three digits

Bridging the gap between robotic technology and health care

Although technology and computation power have become more and more present in our daily lives, we have yet to see the same tendency in robotics applied to health care. In this work we focused on the study of four distinct applications of robotic technology to health care, named Robotic Assisted Surgery, Robotics in Rehabilitation, Prosthetics and Companion Robotic Systems. We identified the main roadblocks that are limiting the progress of such applications by an extensive examination of recent reports. Based on the limitations of the practical use of current robotic technology for health care we proposed a general modularization approach for the conception and implementation of specific robotic devices. The main conclusions of this review are: (i) there is a clear need of the adaptation of robotic technology (closed loop) to the user, so that robotics can be widely accepted and used in the context of heath care; (ii) for all studied robotic technologies cost is still prohibitive and limits their wide use. The reduction of costs influences technology acceptability; thus innovation by using cheaper computer systems and sensors is relevant and should be taken into account in the implementation of robotic systems