I have been invited to participate in a panel discussion on “Digital Society Trends: New Forms of Machine-Human Interactions” at ACHI2010 where I will present the trends in the state of the art of medical simulation.

Chair – Prof Bernd Radig –  Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany

Participants

Till Halbach, Norwegian Computing Center, Norway
José Rouillard, LIFL Laboratory – University of Lille1, France
Lindsay Grace, Miami University, U.S.A.
Timothy Coles, Istituto Italiano di Tecnolologia, Italy
Claudia Zapata, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Perú

This journal publication surveys the state-of-the-art of the use of haptics in medical training simulations. A comprehensive review of commercially available haptics devices, both force and tactile feedback given and a comparison made. This is followed by an in depth survey of many medical training simulations (over 135 references) in various fields. The review is summarised with scrutiny of emerging technologies and discusses future directions in the field.

Timothy R. Coles, Dwight Meglan, Nigel W. John, “The Role of Haptics in Medical Training Simulators: A Survey of the State-of-the-art,” IEEE Transactions on Haptics, 19 Apr. 2010. IEEE computer Society Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society, http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TOH.2010.19

Accepted to ACHI for a second year running I am presenting work performed during my masters thesis with Prof N.W.John of Bangor University.  This work also included (but not mentioned in this paper) an application for the evaluation of hemispatial neglect in stroke patients.

T.R. Coles, N. W. John, “The Effectiveness of Commercial Haptic Devices for Use in Virtual Needle Insertion Training Simulations,” Advances in Computer-Human Interaction, 2010, Third International Conference on, 2010. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ACHI.2010.20

I had the opportunity to help my colleague Sylvain Calinon demonstrate his work at Campus Party, Bogota 2009. Sylvain is a post doc at EPFL, Switzerland and IIT, Italy with research interests in robot programming by demonstration, learning by imitation and human-robot interaction.

Two applications, cooking and painting, were demonstrated to crowds of people from Bogota. The HOAP-3 robot was covered extensively on TV, so much so that even the security man in Bogota airport had seen the robot on TV. The disadvantage? Having to open our hand luggage multiple times for “security checks” and a quick look at the robot.

More coverage here –Programming by Demonstration

A paper on the first developments in my PhD project has been accepted in ACHI 2009.

T. R. Coles, N. W. John, D. A. Gould, and D. G. Caldwell, “Haptic Palpation for the Femoral Pulse in Virtual Interventional Radiology,” Advances in Computer-Human Interaction, 2009 Second International Conference on, pp. 193-198, 2009.

This introduces three tested technologies for tactile simulation of a femoral pulse and the initial modification of a Novint Falcon haptic device.