Evaluating the Effect of Force Feedback in Cell Injection

Conventional methods of manipulating individual biological cells have been prevalent in the field of molecular biology. These methods do not have the ability to provide force feedback to an operator. Poor control of cell injection force is one of the primary reasons for low success rates in cell injection and transgenesis in particular. Therefore, there exists a need to incorporate force feedback into a cell injection system. We have developed a force feedback interface, which has the capability of measuring forces in the range of $\mu{\rm N}$ and provide a haptic display of the cell injection forces in real time. Using this force feedback interface, we performed several human factors studies to evaluate the effect of force feedback on cell injection outcomes. We tested our system with 40 human subjects and our experimental results indicate that the subjects were able to feel the cell injection force and confirmed our research hypothesis that the use of combined vision and force feedback leads to a higher success rate in cell injection task compared to using vision feedback alone.