Design, Development, and Validation of a Wearable Haptic Thimble for Remote Palpation

During the last years, the need for telemedicine to face the challenge of health-care delivery in critical situations, as for example outbreaks of pandemic diseases, has acquired increasing importance. Despite that, there is no established technology to allow remote palpation in unstructured environments. Only few frameworks are available in literature, and the latters allow to perform skin indentation by sensing the contact force at a single contact point. In this thesis, a novel haptic device has been designed and tested by extending a former framework developed by the Siena Robotics and Systems Laboratory (SirsLab, UniSi). In the just mentioned framework a patient wears on his own finger a sensing device, in order to perform the palpation task himself, while at the same time a doctor wears a feedback device, able to replicate the pressure exerted by the patient on his own skin. The new developed device consists of a silicone haptic thimble holding four small form-factor force sensors, in this way the force exerted by the patient during the palpation task distributes on four different contact points represented by the sensing parts of the sensors. Thanks to this, the doctor is able to better understand how the patient's finger pressure distributes on the touched skin. Since the framework is based on a doctor that guides the patient through vocal instructions, a new video-call communication system has been developed by using multi-thread programming and TCP/IP sockets, able to manage both audio-video information and tactile information related to the telepalpation system.