Characterization of Hand Movements using a Sensing Glove in Hand Assisted Laparoscopic Surgery

The past thirty years have seen increasingly rapid advances in the field of laparoscopic surgery, in part because of the use of robots. A well-known example is the da Vinci surgical system. However, far too little attention has been paid to Hand Assisted Laparoscopic Surgery (HALS), a surgery in which the surgeon introduces the non-dominant hand into the abdomen of the patient. The risk of collision between the hand of the surgeon and the tool moved by the robot is the reason why these robots for laparoscopic surgery are not appropriate for HALS. On the other hand, in recent years, there has been an increasing interest in wearables, which have been introduced in our daily life. This interest and the lack of surgery robots for HALS are the reasons to develop a sensing glove which co-works whit a collaborative robot in this kind of surgery. The aim of this paper is to study the use of a sensing glove which will provide information of the movements of the surgeon’s hand to the collaborative robot. This information determinates the actions that the robot will carry on. The first step was to define different movements of the hand which could be identified. An algorithm identifies these movements using the data given by the sensing glove. For the purpose of algorithm accuracy measurement, 4 persons wearing the sensing glove made a sequence with different movements. The evidence from this study suggests that a sensing glove can be used to send information of the movements of the surgeon’s hand to a collaborative robot during a HALS.