Tactile feedback as a sensory subtraction technique in haptics for needle insertion

A sensory substitution technique is presented in which the kinesthetic and tactile feedback are substituted by tactile feedback only provided by two wearable devices able to apply forces to the index finger and thumb holding a handle during a needle insertion task. The force pattern fed back to the user while using the tactile device is similar, in terms of intensity and area of application, to that perceived while interacting with a haptic device providing both tactile and kinesthetic feedback and it can be thought as a subtraction between the complete haptic and kinesthetic feedback. For this reason we refer to this approach as sensory subtraction instead of sensory substitution. A needle insertion scenario is considered. The haptic device is connected to a virtual environment simulating a needle insertion task. Experiments show that the perception of inserting a needle using the tactile feedback only is nearly indistinguishable from the one felt by the user using both tactile and kinesthetic feedback. As most of the sensory substitution approaches, also this does not suffer from typical stability issues of teleoperation systems due for instance to delays. Moreover experiments show that the proposed sensory substitution technique outperforms sensory substitution with more conventional visual feedback.