Researchers at the University of Texas Dallas are working to develop a system that adds the sense of touch to virtual reality systems. This could mean big things for telemedicine.
"With in-home rehabilitation, doctors ask a patient if he or she has done their exercises, but the patient may not be doing them correctly," said Dr. Balakrishnan Prabhakaran, a computer science professor at UT Dallas and principal investigator working to create the system funded by the National Science Foundation. "It is one thing for a patient to say he or she did their exercises, but it is another to watch them in the action, feel the force exerted, be able to correct them on the spot and get immediate response."
Such a system will likely use haptic devices, which feature resistance motors that provide feedback to the user through force, vibration or motion. A haptic device mimicking a stone would "feel" hard and not offer any give, while a haptic device protraying a virtual sponge would give easily and feel pliable. If there are haptic devices in both a doctor's and patient's environment, an applied force can be transferred from one person to another, simulating touch.
Sending haptic feedback would transfer enormous amounts of data, which would create a complicated challenge. And a delay in connection in a medical scenario requriing precision involving haptic devices could be catastrophic. "We absolutely do not want instability," Prabhakaran told Phys Org.
Visual cues are also incredibly important to the project. "We do not only want the person to be moving the device, we want them to have a visual feel of what the mvoement is causing," said Prabhakaran. A co-principal investigator, Dr. Xiaohu Guo, associate professor of computer science at the university, and an expert in computer graphics, animation and modeling, is working to create visual representations fo the movements in real time.
Another solution to the "big data" problem with a system like this is to use sensors similar to those in smartphones that adjust the oreintation of the screen. "If we put body sensors on the patients, then his or her movements can be tracked with high accuracy. The advantage of the sensor is the data that is generated is onyl a few bytes large, so it is easily transmitted over the network," said Prabhakaran. "You need a 3D model to provide visual perspective, but if you are dealing with a lousy network and can not have consistent visual perspective, the body sensors could provide that information.
Prabhakaran says that although the main focus of the project is telemedicine, a system like this could also be used in educational situations requiring people to be in the same space, like dance instruction.