Tele-healthcare with humanoid robots: A user study on the evaluation of force feedback effects

The progress of robotic technology in the last years paved the way for its application in the healthcare sector. In the light of demographic change and lack of nursing staff, telerobotic systems are a promising solution e.g. for homecare in rural areas or in quarantine stations to prevent dissemination of pathogens. This paper presents a user study investigating human performance when teleoperating a complex humanoid robot with an underactuated haptic interface. Twelve novices had to complete basic movement and contact tasks as well as more typical healthcare tasks like instrument handling and usage (pulse oximetry). Besides the general performance level we explored the effect of different force feedback architectures (with vs. without sensor-based force information) and of workspace scaling (1:1 vs. 1:2). The test subjects showed in the majority of tasks significantly best performance with the 3-Channel architecture and a scaling of 1:2.