Robotics in medicine has huge potential; eventually, the work in the area will lead to amazing achievements which would have been impossible without robots. One of the developing areas is surgical simulation, where successful developments would create more realistic scenarios for training surgeons. Here, an challenge is how to improve haptic realism (which is simulation of force feedback).
I have the privilege of working with the Raven Surgical robot in the BioRobotics lab at Harvard. In addition to helping supervise a few student projects, I am working on a few methods to measure forces and convey them back to the user (i.e. implement force feedback). Here is a nice photo of the current team posted on the RavenII Dev Blog
Unfortunately, surgeons who have tried the OrthoForce haptic device like the ergonomics yet claim that it does not feel realistic. In the past, my research has focused on improving realism of the haptical simulator. Please email me if you have questions.
OrthoForce is a haptic device which was developed by Edward Dibble at the Mechatronics in Medicine Lab at Imperial College London.
Here is me presenting the device :
YouTube - OrthoForce Haptic Device - presented by me