UCL Biomedical Engineering Year 3 Individual Project: A Real-time 3D GUI tool for “Smart Surgical Gloves” with location and pressure sensors
"Smart Surgical Gloves” is a wearable device that integrates both the location and pressure sensors to record information from reality and input into the digital system. This idea of constructing a sensorized surgical glove was introduced previously in a research paper.[1] It implements a sensor to monitor force applied during some surgical tasks. For the case of “Smart Surgical Gloves,” which has more than one sensor, synchronizing the data will be important. An integrated system has been made for collecting data from both sensors and synchronizing them with Arduino. After that, there are quite a lot of things that could be done to these data, i.e., plotting a stress-strain graph to characterize the material properties, and converting x, y, and z-coordinates to Euler angle for 3D visualization.
Smart Surgical Gloves could be applied in a broad range of areas, such as, medical presentations, examinations, and diagnosis. In this project, it is particularly focusing on the problem for prostate examinations to diagnosis prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is the 2nd most common type of cancer among men and the 4th among all. There were more than 1.4 million new cases in 2020 worldwide.[2] One of the most common ways for diagnosing prostate cancer is digital rectal examination (DRE). In the examination, doctors only rely on their senses and experiences. This might result in low reliability and precision. The aim of this project is to create a visualization for the examination to assist the diagnosis and increase the reliability by providing data.
References:
[1] H. Layard Horsfall et al., ‘A Sensorised Surgical Glove to Analyze Forces During Neurosurgery’, Neurosurgery, vol. 92, no. 3, p. 639, 2023, doi: 10.1227/neu.0000000000002239.
[2] ‘Prostate cancer statistics | World Cancer Research Fund International’, WCRF International. [Online]. Available: https://www.wcrf.org/cancer-trends/prostate-cancer-statistics/