Adaptive Surgical Robotic Training Using Real-Time Stylistic Behavior Feedback through Haptic Cues

Surgical skill directly affects surgical procedure outcomes; thus, effective training is needed to ensure satisfactory results. Many objective assessment metrics have been developed that provide the trainee with descriptive feedback about their performance however, these metrics often lack feedback on how to improve performance. The most effective training method is one that is intuitive, easy to understand, personalized, and provided in a timely manner. We propose a framework to enable user-adaptive training using near real-time detection of performance, based on intuitive styles of surgical movements, and design a haptic feedback framework to assist with correcting styles of movement. We evaluate the ability of three types of force feedback (spring, damping, and spring plus damping feedback), computed based on prior user positions to improve different stylistic behaviors of the user during kinematically constrained reaching movement tasks. The results indicate that five out of six styles studied here were improved using at least one of the three types of force feedback. Task performance metrics were compared in the presence of the three types of feedback. Task time was statistically significantly lower when applying spring feedback, compared to the other two types of feedback. Path straightness and targeting error were statistically significantly improved when using spring-damping feedback compared to the other two types of feedback. This study presents a groundwork for adaptive training in robotic surgery based on near real-time human-centric models of surgical behavior.