Verbal Outperforms Cartesian Tactile Guidance in Telementored Needle Insertion Training

Needle decompression is an urgent medical task to remove excess air in the chest, often performed by individuals who lack training. Inspired by prior work, our sleeve uses our best performing 3D guidance cue strategy to date, Cartesian feedback, to give online directional cues in 3D space. The tactile cues are felt as strokes in the left, right, forward, and backward direction, or pulses on the top or bottom of the hand to indicate down or up motion, respectively. The goal of this study is to evaluate if haptic cues given in an online way could outperform verbal cues for needle placement. Our between-subjects experiment revealed that verbal cues in fact outperformed the tactile guidance cues, having respective median error values of 1.00 mm and 1.17 mm between the mentor and trainee positions. These results indicate that the efficacy of simple Cartesian tactile guidance reduces when it is applied in an online way, specifically in the case of simple desired motions in Cartesian space.