A one-DOF freehand haptic device for robotic tele-echography.

Tele-echography may be an interesting alternative to conventional care when the medical expert is not close to the patient to be examined. In a system for tele-echography, medical expert proprioception and gesture feelings must be preserved to synchronize the ultrasound images with the motion made by the physician. It is why we develop a master-slave system for robotic tele-echography integrating force feedback. Because existing haptic devices are not fully adapted to this application--their workspace is often small and their basis is fixed--, we have developed a one-dimensional free-hand force feedback device. In this paper, we describe the design and a first evaluation of this new haptic device for robotic tele-echography.