Bimanual Haptic Simulator for Training Hand Palpation and Lumbar Puncture

This paper addresses a bimanual haptic simulator for training human hand palpation and needle insertion motor skills in lumbar puncture medical procedure using two haptic device for medical students and physicians. This virtual reality environment simulates the human hand palpation and needle puncture with visual and haptic feedback. In this work, we studied lateral haptic model for rendering human hand palpation and layered haptic model for lumbar needle puncture. We have developed a training simulator for detecting the lumbar position and spinal needle insertion skills for lumbar puncture that can be demonstrated as a concept prototype to the medical haptic simulations.