Although haptic feedback is critical for many surgical tasks, surgeons cannot currently obtain haptic feedback from teleoperated surgical robots because it is difficult to attach force sensitive sensors to the surgical robot in the surgery environment. Therefore, force sensitive forceps with an optical fibre Bragg grating sensor attached on the grasper are proposed. The proposed prototype forceps confirmed that the sensitive grasping force in the teleoperated grasper is comparable to the providing force and measuring force.

Touchscreen interaction has become a fundamental means of controlling mobile phones and smartwatches. However, the small form factor of a smartwatch limits the available interactive surface area. To overcome this limitation, we propose the expansion of the touch region of the screen to the back of the user’s hand. We developed a touch module for sensing the touched finger position on the back of the hand using infrared (IR) line image sensors, based on the calibrated IR intensity and the maximum intensity region of an IR array. For complete touch-sensing solution, a gyroscope installed in the smartwatch is used to read the wrist gestures. The gyroscope incorporates a dynamic time warping gesture recognition algorithm for eliminating unintended touch inputs during the free motion of the wrist while wearing the smartwatch. The prototype of the developed sensing module was implemented in a commercial smartwatch, and it was confirmed that the sensed positional information of the finger when it was used to touch the back of the hand could be used to control the smartwatch graphical user interface. Our system not only affords a novel experience for smartwatch users, but also provides a basis for developing other useful interfaces.

A novel and intuitive way of accessing applications of mobile devices is presented. The key idea is to use grip-pattern, which is naturally produced when a user tries to use the mobile device, as a clue to determine an application to be launched. To this end, a capacitive touch sensor system is carefully designed and installed underneath the housing of the mobile device to capture the information of the user's grip-pattern. The captured data is then recognized by a minimum distance classifier and a naive Bayes classifier. The recognition test is performed to validate the feasibility of the proposed user interface system

This paper proposes a tactile display providing both shear and normal feedback to the fingertip for generating three-axis tactile feedback during teleoperation of a surgical robot. The display is composed of five balloons actuated by controlling the pneumatic pressure. The implemented display is 18 mm × 18 mm × 15 mm. This size is suitable for mounting the display onto the master controls of a surgical robot. The maximum normal and shear displacements are 2 and 1.3 mm, respectively. The proposed tactile display may provide perceivable stimuli to a human finger pad in all five directions: normal, distal, proximal, radial, and ulnar. This paper also reports on the results of psychophysical measurement of the minimum perceivable movement of the developed tactile display for each of the five directions.