Simulation Study to Test Feasibility of a Planar Teleoperated Linkage for Qualitative Stiffness Sensing with Communication Delays

Access to primary health care is severely lacking in rural India. There are already some efforts where health practitioners interact with patients in rural areas through mobile applications that provide audio and visual communication. It could be useful to augment this interaction with some measure of tactile communication between the doctor and patient. One application of such tactile interaction is perceiving tissue stiffness increase due to ailments such as liver cirrhosis that is prevalent in rural India. The goal of this paper is to perform a preliminary computer simulation study to ascertain whether a pair of simple planar two-link manipulators forming a teleoperated master-slave system over mobile phone networks (these are ubiquitous even in rural India) are capable of ”qualitatively” discerning liver stiffness change due to cirrhosis. It is shown that the error in stiffness estimation is reasonably small compared to the increase in liver stiffness due to cirrhosis and is acceptable to obtain a ”qualitative” sense of increase in liver stiffness due to disease.