Development of tension/compression detection sensor system designed to acquire quantitative force information while training the airway management task

Up to now, different kinds of medical training systems have been developed which were designed to reproduce the human anatomy in high fidelity. However, these kinds of systems are limited to provide quantitative information of the trainees' operation, only provide subjective assessment to them, and finally to provide few feedbacks to them. Therefore, we would like to propose the advanced medical training method using RT which enables us to not only provide quantitative information of the trainees' operation, but also objective evaluation to them from the quantitative information. For the purpose of these facts, we developed Waseda Kyotokagaku Airway-No.1 Refined (WKA-1R) which embeds many sensors in order to provide quantitative information of the trainees' skill as well as an evaluation unit for them. However, the force sensor of WKA-1R has three problems, such as a limited measurement of the applied force, calibration, and maintenance for practicality. In this paper, we propose newly developed Tension/Compression Detection Sensor System (TCDSS) which not only reinforces calibration and maintenance for practicality, but also enables us to measure tension, compression, and torque. In addition, we also propose a Tactile Detection Sensor System (TDSS) which enables us to obtain the information of tactile sensation of the robot. Finally, preliminary experiments have been proposed to obtain the characteristic curve on the TCDSS.