Medical Applications of Haptic Information

Abstract

Tactile information are utilized almost everywhere in medical practice. Although the information is important, it is difficult to learn/teach, reproduce and record them. Recent virtual reality technology in medical field can handle a part of tactile information. This paper summarizes tactile sensory of human and progress in haptic devices, and introduces some recent medical applications with haptics. Technical aspects in haptic rendering, delay/latency in haptic response and time/accuracy trade-off in physical elastic simulation are mentioned.