Advancing Remote Medical Palpation through Cognition and Emotion

TL;DR

This paper explores the cognitive and emotional aspects of medical palpation, proposing a mixed-reality telepalpation system evaluated by clinicians, revealing insights into touch transmission and force perception variability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework modeling active and passive touch pathways and develops a telepalpation prototype to study these interactions.

Findings

Touch location was transmitted reliably across participants.

Force perception showed systematic inter-individual variation.

Force alone is insufficient to characterize the palpation experience.

Abstract

Medical palpation is more than force transmission. It is a bidirectional cognitive and emotional exchange between doctor and patient. We model two complementary touch pathways: active touch by the doctor (kinesthetic and tactile) and passive touch by the patient (subjective and emotional). We use this framework to design a mixed-reality telepalpation prototype and evaluate it with 14 experienced clinicians serving as both doctors and patients across 391 trials. Touch location was transmitted reliably across participants, while force perception showed systematic inter-individual variation, suggesting that force alone is insufficient to characterize the palpation experience.