Evaluating the Role of Force Feedback for Biomanipulation Tasks

Conventional cell manipulation techniques 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 an automated cell injection system, which has the capability of measuring forces in the range of μN. We tested our system with 40 human subjects to evaluate the role of force feedback in cell injection task. 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 higher success rate in cell injection task compared to using vision feedback alone.