Multimodal navigation with a vibrotactile display in computer assisted surgery

Abstract

A new concept of a tactile human-machine interface for surgical interventions via multimodal computer navigated surgery is presented in this paper. In contrast to conventional computer navigated surgery, information about the surgeon are explicitly processed and used to augment the human machine interaction by a vibro-tactile display. By means of this display the system is extended by non visual data presentation through tactile information transmission. Different tactile activation schemes (mono linear, duo linear) in which different numbers of tactors are activated to transmit direction information, are tested and compared. The experimental evaluation adds up with a mean error of -0.35 mm and a standard deviation of 0.51 mm for the mono linear scheme and a mean error of -0.01 mm and a standard deviation of 0.62 mm for the duo linear scheme. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.