Brain activity measurement to evaluate hand-eye coordination for slave and endoscope in a surgical robot

Mechanical performance of a surgical robot can be evaluated and improved based on a working score; however, intuitive operability cannot be evaluated in this way. We propose a method that measures the user´s brain activity for evaluating intuitive operability from the perspective of cognitive science. We hypothesized that hand-eye coordination, such as the slave configuration for the endoscope, has the greatest effect on intuitive operability, because it is the cause of physical differences between a human and a robot. The objective of this paper is to clarify the appropriate slave configuration for the endoscope to study hand-eye coordination using brain activity measurements. In the experiment, we used a brain imaging device, optical topography, to measure the users´ brain activity while they controlled the hand-controller to position the tip of the virtual arm on the target. The experiment was carried out a number of times with the virtual arm position configured in a variety of ways. According to the results, some subjects showed peak performance with a specific slave configuration. We conclude that the slave configuration with the highest brain activity depends on the body image, which is a spatial symbol in the human brain from the perspective of cognitive science.