The Virtual Haptic Human Upper Body for Palpatory Diagnostic Training

Modern virtual medical simulators have many advantages over their manikin counterparts. For example, they are more repeatable and reconfigurable. The virtual reality can be upgraded and modified to serve different training purposes. The goal of the Virtual Haptic Human Upper Body (VHHUB) research is to create a physiologically-correct human upper body for osteopathic medical gross motion palpation training using haptics and virtual reality technologies. The virtual human upper body is a 71 degrees-of-freedom multiple end-effectors, multi-branching serial chain model. It has fully movable thoracic and lumbar spinal regions plus two shoulders and two arms with a deformable body. Due to the complexity of the VHHUB model, we present a velocity inverse kinematic problem solver with dynamic pivot point. This method ensures a smooth synchronization rate between graphics and haptic hardware in real time. Fryette's principles are implemented in the VHHUB. Fryette's principles are one of the fundamental theories for the osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM) to diagnose somatic dysfunctions. The VHHUB software is developed in a way to help osteopathic physicians or OMM fellows fine tune the program for their student's training. The haptic feedback of somatic dysfunctions can be modified by OMM faculty administrators without any knowledge of programming languages. The VHHUB provides an additional training tool for the osteopathic medical students to augment their osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM) laboratory courses. VHHUB evaluation and recommendations for future research are presented. From the preliminary evaluation data, most medical students gave 7 or up (scale from 1 to 10: 1 is unrealistic and 10 is realistic) on the realism of the VHHUB. Medical students also felt the simulation gave them a useful tool for learning Fryette's principles.