The proliferation of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery highlights the need for advanced training tools such as cost-effective robotic endotrainers. Current surgical robots often lack haptic feedback, which is crucial for providing surgeons with a real-time sense of touch. This absence can impact the surgeon's ability to perform delicate operations effectively. To enhance surgical training and address this deficiency, we have integrated a cost-effective haptic feedback system into a robotic endotrainer. This system incorporates both kinesthetic (force) and tactile feedback, improving the fidelity of surgical simulations and enabling more precise control during operations. Our system incorporates an innovative, cost-effective Force/Torque sensor utilizing optoelectronic technology, specifically designed to accurately detect forces and moments exerted on surgical tools with a 95% accuracy, providing essential kinesthetic feedback. Additionally, we implemented a tactile feedback mechanism that informs the surgeon of the gripping forces between the tool's tip and the tissue. This dual feedback system enhances the fidelity of training simulations and the execution of robotic surgeries, promoting broader adoption and safer practices.

There is a recent boom in the development of AI solutions to facilitate and enhance diagnostic procedures for established clinical tools. To assess the integrity of the developing nervous system, the Prechtl general movement assessment (GMA) is recognized for its clinical value in diagnosing neurological impairments in early infancy. GMA has been increasingly augmented through machine learning approaches intending to scale-up its application, circumvent costs in the training of human assessors and further standardize classification of spontaneous motor patterns. Available deep learning tools, all of which are based on single sensor modalities, are however still considerably inferior to that of well-trained human assessors. These approaches are hardly comparable as all models are designed, trained and evaluated on proprietary/silo-data sets. With this study we propose a sensor fusion approach for assessing fidgety movements (FMs) comparing three different sensor modalities (pressure, inertial, and visual sensors). Various combinations and two sensor fusion approaches (late and early fusion) for infant movement classification were tested to evaluate whether a multi-sensor system outperforms single modality assessments. The performance of the three-sensor fusion (classification accuracy of 94.5\%) was significantly higher than that of any single modality evaluated, suggesting the sensor fusion approach is a promising avenue for automated classification of infant motor patterns. The development of a robust sensor fusion system may significantly enhance AI-based early recognition of neurofunctions, ultimately facilitating automated early detection of neurodevelopmental conditions.

Aiming at objective early detection of neuromotor disorders such as cerebral palsy, we proposed an innovative non-intrusive approach using a pressure sensing device to classify infant general movements (GMs). Here, we tested the feasibility of using pressure data to differentiate typical GM patterns of the ''fidgety period'' (i.e., fidgety movements) vs. the ''pre-fidgety period'' (i.e., writhing movements). Participants (N = 45) were sampled from a typically-developing infant cohort. Multi-modal sensor data, including pressure data from a 32x32-grid pressure sensing mat with 1024 sensors, were prospectively recorded for each infant in seven succeeding laboratory sessions in biweekly intervals from 4-16 weeks of post-term age. For proof-of-concept, 1776 pressure data snippets, each 5s long, from the two targeted age periods were taken for movement classification. Each snippet was pre-annotated based on corresponding synchronised video data by human assessors as either fidgety present (FM+) or absent (FM-). Multiple neural network architectures were tested to distinguish the FM+ vs. FM- classes, including support vector machines (SVM), feed-forward networks (FFNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. The CNN achieved the highest average classification accuracy (81.4%) for classes FM+ vs. FM-. Comparing the pros and cons of other methods aiming at automated GMA to the pressure sensing approach, we concluded that the pressure sensing approach has great potential for efficient large-scale motion data acquisition and sharing. This will in return enable improvement of the approach that may prove scalable for daily clinical application for evaluating infant neuromotor functions.

Novel high-resolution pressure-sensor arrays allow treating pressure readings as standard images. Computer vision algorithms and methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can be used to identify contact objects. In this paper, a high-resolution tactile sensor has been attached to a robotic end-effector to identify contacted objects. Two CNN-based approaches have been employed to classify pressure images. These methods include a transfer learning approach using a pre-trained CNN on an RGB-images dataset and a custom-made CNN (TactNet) trained from scratch with tactile information. The transfer learning approach can be carried out by retraining the classification layers of the network or replacing these layers with an SVM. Overall, 11 configurations based on these methods have been tested: 8 transfer learning-based, and 3 TactNet-based. Moreover, a study of the performance of the methods and a comparative discussion with the current state-of-the-art on tactile object recognition is presented.