A novel hand-controller for remote ultrasound imaging

This paper presents the development of a novel hand-controller, designed to help physicians to perform ultrasound imaging on patients located at a remote site. Specifically, this paper reports detailed design, kinematics analysis, prototype device, and application tests of the proposed hand-controller. The hand-controller has certain characteristics which make it novel from mechanical point of view and with respect to its suitability for providing standard clinical motions of ultrasound imaging. It is a four-degree-of-freedom device and uses parallel mechanisms in its configuration with lightweight moving parts. It has a fixed center-of-motion, which allows operators to generate the required ultrasound motions. The mechanism provides a large and singularity-free spherical workspace. All degrees of freedom are kinematically decoupled, i.e., the hand-controller has independent drive systems for each degree of freedom. Additionally, all force reflecting actuators are located on the ground and their mechanical transmissions are backdriveable. A prototype of the hand-controller has been constructed and was evaluated using two case studies, one of which applies directly to remote ultrasound imaging of kidney.