Preliminary design and fabrication of smart handheld surgical tool with tactile feedback

In this paper, we present a smart handheld surgical tool with tactile feedback to help microsurgery. This device consists of force sensors attached to the tool tip and tactile displays on the position of the fingerhold. The sensor is capacitive one and measures not only the magnitude of force, but also the direction of force. The sensor can measure 9N of lateral forces along x-y-z direction. The tactile display is based on dielectric elastomer actuators and made up of three rigid coupling tactile display modules. The tactile displays provide stimuli of 170μm displacement and frequency of 10Hz at the surgeons fingertips. We fabricate the device and its performances are experimentally validated.