Miniature sensor replicates human touch

A group of researchers have created a millimeter sized sensor that is capable of recreating a number of our tactile abilities, such as force and position of contact, softness of a grasped object, and slippage. The technology -- which utilizes polystyrene beams that bend when put in contact with a soft surface -- might be able to assist doctors in performing minimally invasive surgery (or MIS) by adding additional force-feedback information from the subject (up until now, surgeons have had to rely heavily on visual data transmitted from an endoscope). The tiny sensors could be micromachined (a type of integrated circuit manufacture), and would thus be simple and cost effective to fabricate for medical uses. The next stages will be further miniaturization, integration with MIS tools, and animal tissue testing.

[paloooz @ Jun 27th 2007 8:29PM]

Doctors can have force feedback but PS3 cant?

[JohnTitor @ Jun 27th 2007 10:14PM]

great, now they can implement it on that freaky robot hand

[Manuel @ Jun 28th 2007 9:46AM]

i could use a hand ...

[stitifier @ Jun 27th 2007 10:52PM]

Even as a non-surgical doctor, it's readily apparent to me how useful this technology would be. Anybody who's attempted to even simulate MIS understands how difficult it can be to judge spatial relationships onscreen or know when too much force is being applied to an object (like, say, intestines). That's mostly because MIS requires surgeons to think about 3 dimensional space using a 2 dimensional screen. Tactile feedback would give information relating to that 3rd dimension and would undoubtedly improve outcomes and would probably even improve surgery times (which goes to outcome). All we need now is for a 3 dimensional camera to be developed and we're all set.