Being part of the Amrita family, AMMACHI Labs has access to the medical expertise of the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences hospital, one of the leading hospitals in India and a pioneer in advanced medical procedures provided to people at little cost. We are currently working with surgeons at Amrita Hospital to develop cost-effective simulators for training students of surgery. We develop novel algorithms and mathematical models to simulate tool-tissue interactions, especially in the context of multi-point haptics rendering.

Lumbar spinal needle puncture is a blind process commonly used by surgeons needing fine motor skills to identify the lumbar position via hand palpation, control the depth and angle of needle insertion using visual and haptic feedback. It is a blind process, in which physicians get the idea of needle insertion depth mainly through haptic feedback. In collaboration with surgeons from Amrita Hospital, our engineers developed a bimanual haptic simulator for training human hand palpation and needle insertion motor skills. For accurate haptic feedback of the forces involved in the process, we modeled a lateral haptic model for rendering human hand palpation and a layered haptic model for modeling lumbar needle puncture.