Collaborative Evaluation of a Haptic-based Medical Virtual Environment

There is increasing use of virtual environments for medical training applications. Simulated medical environments allow clinical staff to practise medical procedures without endangering patients. Haptic devices are a key technology in many such systems adding a sense of touch to virtual interactions allowing healthcare practitioners to practise and test their clinical skills in life-like situations. However, evaluating haptic-based virtual environments can be difficult as gathering user feedback on haptic interaction by traditional methods, such as post-session interviews and questionnaires, can be error-prone if users misremember their experiences. This paper describes the use of cooperative evaluation, a modified think aloud protocol, to evaluate the usability of a commercial haptic-based medical virtual environment called Virtual Veins. An evaluation was performed with 3rd year medical students using cooperative evaluation to evaluate Virtual Veins in a target deployment environment. Although the cooperative evaluation was successful in eliciting a number of usability issues, there were few haptic related verbalisations from participants. In haptic-based systems the evaluator does not share the sensory feedback with the participant. This can be problematic in questioning the participants about their haptic experience and encouraging haptic-specific comments.