A novel contactless human-machine interface for laparoscopic telesurgery

International audienceDuring the last three decades, the field of laparoscopic surgery has constantly been subject to technological advances looking to offer better healthcare in terms of safety, patient outcome, medical staff coordination and comfort [1]. Through the increasing availability of teleoperation systems for robot-assisted surgery, such as the Da Vinci (Intuitive Surgical Inc.), we have also seen an evolution of human-machine interfaces (HMIs) used to control these robots. Although their first function is to recover kinematic information from the surgeon’s hands, they do have a direct impact on the overall performance of the system. This impact can be evaluated by means of multiple features which measure capacities of the HMI such as dexterity, bimanual exchanges, intuitiveness, comfort and precision, for instance.In this paper, we present a continuation of a previous work [2] concerning a first experimental study to control a teleoperation system using a novel optical HMI, in the context of robot-assisted laparoscopic training