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Development of a smart handheld surgical tool with tactile feedback

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Abstract

This paper presents a handheld surgical tool adapting a tactile feedback system. The tool consists of a 3-degree-of-freedom (DOF) force sensor and three tactile displays. The sensor is easily embedded in the tool by adopting the capacitive transduction principle. The sensor measures the direction and magnitude of the 3-DOF force applied to the tool tip. The fingertip grasping the tool is stimulated by the tactile display to transmit the contact force information measured by the sensor. The tactile display is actuated by employing a soft actuator technology based on a dielectric elastomer actuator such as a type of electroactive polymer actuator. In this work, a prototype of the tool is designed and fabricated. Its performance is experimentally validated.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. 2011-0030075) and by the convergence technology development program for bionic arm through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (No. 2014M3C1B2048175).

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Correspondence to Hyouk Ryeol Choi.

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Lee, C., Kim, U., Lee, DH. et al. Development of a smart handheld surgical tool with tactile feedback. Intel Serv Robotics 10, 149–158 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-016-0214-5

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