Incorporating Olfactory into a Multi-Modal Surgical Simulation

This paper proposes a novel multimodal interactive surgical simulator that incorporates haptic, olfactory, as well as traditional vision feedback. A scent diffuser was developed to produce odors when errors occur. Haptic device was used to provide the sense of touch to the user. The preliminary results show that adding smell as an aid to the simulation enhanced the memory retention that lead to better performance. key words: olfactory, haptic, surgical simulation, mulitmodal interaction