Comparative Study of Hand-Tracking and Traditional Control Interfaces for Remote Palpation

Medical robotics has been widely accepted in several fields in the healthcare system. However, despite several attempts and a well-understood potential, teleoperation is still far from permeating primary care and tasks such as remote palpation, despite significant advancements in both haptic and tactile feedback. With most of the current focus on the feedback channel, the control interface has largely been overlooked. However, recent studies have proposed control interfaces so as to resemble as much as possible in-person palpation. Although hypothesized, they have not been systematically proven to be more intuitive or natural than traditional ones. In this paper, we implement a hand-guided control interface and investigate its performance, comparing it to a keyboard and a joystick-based control interface. We extract both objective and subjective measurements. We show how the hand-guided control, despite being more similar to the in-person task, achieves lower speed and worse precision, especially for point-wise target reaching. Moreover, it is perceived as less intuitive by the users, conversely to what was previously theorized in literature.