Instrumenting hand-held surgical drills with a pneumatic sensing cover for haptic feedback

Despite the recent achievements in the development of open surgery tools, preserving the haptic capabilities during drilling tasks is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel tool for hand-held drills composed of a cover for force sensing and a haptic display for force feedback. A pneumatic device has been developed to estimate the contact force occurring during the interaction between drill bit and bones. A performance comparison with a precise commercial force sensor proved the reliability of the measurements. A haptic ring is in charge of providing cutaneous sensations helping the surgeon in performing the task. The effectiveness of our method has been confirmed by experimental results and supported by statistical analysis.