Advancing Remote Medical Palpation through Cognition and Emotion
For telemedicine and haptics researchers, this work provides a cognitive-emotional framework for remote palpation, though the prototype evaluation is preliminary with limited quantitative performance metrics.
The paper models medical palpation as a bidirectional cognitive and emotional exchange, designing a mixed-reality telepalpation prototype evaluated with 14 clinicians across 391 trials. Results show reliable touch location transmission but systematic inter-individual variation in force perception, indicating force alone is insufficient for characterizing palpation.
Medical palpation is more than force transmission. It is a bidirectional cognitive and emotional exchange between doctor and patient. We model two complementary touch pathways: active touch by the doctor (kinesthetic and tactile) and passive touch by the patient (subjective and emotional). We use this framework to design a mixed-reality telepalpation prototype and evaluate it with 14 experienced clinicians serving as both doctors and patients across 391 trials. Touch location was transmitted reliably across participants, while force perception showed systematic inter-individual variation, suggesting that force alone is insufficient to characterize the palpation experience.