2011 Volume 16 Issue 4 Pages 597-605
Tracheal Intubation is a medical procedure in which a tube is placed into the trachea, through the mouth, to help breathing. Normally, intubation is facilitated by using a laryngoscope, and this skill is very important for an emergency practitioner to master. However, it is not easy to learn this skill because it is hard for learners to understand the way of manipulating the laryngoscope only with verbal and gestural instructions from an instructor while they train this procedure. To assist this learning process, we propose a new haptic display called Outer-Covering Haptic Display (OCHD) which covers learner's hand and applies haptic sensation to the outside of the learner's hand holding the laryngoscope. OCHD is controlled by the instructor using master-slave method so that the learner's hand movement is guided as if it is accompanied by the instructor's hand. Our preliminary experiment showed that the OCHD has a possibility to guide the learners hand with less drive force compared to the case that the laryngoscope is directly operated.