Communication of Visual and Auditory Information and The Coordination of Team Task Performance

Due to lack of visual or auditory perceptual information, many tasks require interpersonal coordination and teaming. Dyadic verbal and/or auditory communication typically results in the two people becoming informationally coupled. This experiment examined coupling by using a two-person remote navigation task where one participant blindly drove a remote-controlled car while another participant provided auditory, visual, or a combination of both cues (bimodal). Under these conditions, we evaluated performance using easy, moderate, and hard task difficulties. We predicted that the visual condition would have higher performance measures overall, and the bimodal condition would have higher performance as difficulty increased. Results indicated that visual coupling performs better overall compared to auditory coupling and that bimodal coupling showed increased performance as task difficulty went from moderate to hard. When auditory coupling occurs, the frequency at which teams communicate affects performance— the faster teams spoke, the better they performed, even with visual communication available.

CathROB: A Highly Compact and Versatile Remote Catheter Navigation System

Several remote catheter navigation systems have been developed and are now commercially available. However, these systems typically require specialized catheters or equipment, as well as time-consuming operations for the system set-up. In this paper, we present CathROB, a highly compact and versatile robotic system for remote navigation of standard tip-steerable electrophysiology (EP) catheters. Key features of CathROB include an extremely compact design that minimizes encumbrance and time for system set-up in a standard cath lab, a force-sensing mechanism, an intuitive command interface, and functions for automatic catheter navigation and repositioning. We report in vitro and in vivo animal evaluation of CathROB. In vitro results showed good accuracy in remote catheter navigation and automatic repositioning (1.5 ± 0.6 mm for the left-side targets, 1.7 ± 0.4 mm for the right-side targets). Adequate tissue contact was achieved with remote navigation in vivo. There were no adverse events, including absence of cardiac perforation or cardiac damage, indicative of the safety profile of CathROB. Although further preclinical and clinical studies are required, the presented CathROB system seems to be a promising solution for an affordable and easy-to-use remote catheter navigation.