| Laparoscopic surgery offers significant benefits for patients, but presents surgeons with challenges not encountered in open surgery, including reduced or distorted force-feedback. Recent work has shown that vibrotactile feedback in the form of amplitude modulation has the potential to aid laparoscopic surgeons in perceiving force information. However, the effect of varying other aspects of the vibration signal, such as frequency, has not yet been studied. This research aims to determine whether force information in the form of rotational vibration signals with varying frequency could improve a surgeon's force control, efficiency, accuracy, and confidence in tissue compliance differentiation tasks. A vibration device was designed to be applied to a surgeon's upper arm during surgery, and two experiments were performed to determine the effect of the device on operator performance. Results indicate that force-feedback in this form may be useful for a subset of the population, but is not universally interpretable. |
