McKibben haptic system unifies pipette and injector controls to speed ICSI

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) demands extreme precision and steady hands, yet embryologists typically rely on visual feedback alone while constantly switching between pipette movement and injector controls. Existing haptic systems only report pipette puncture forces, leaving injector states unnoticed. To address this, Kenta Yokoe and colleagues from Nagoya University built an immersive micromanipulation system that unifies both operations into a single-handed interface. It uses McKibben actuators—pneumatic artificial muscles that contract when inflated—to generate haptic sensations representing aspiration, discharge, and contact between the oocyte and pipette, giving operators a direct tactile sense of what is happening at the tip.

In a human-participant experiment, the unified interface improved micromanipulation speed and significantly reduced cognitive workload compared to conventional setups, while the McKibben-based haptics boosted overall system usability. This suggests that combining operation integration with pneumatic haptic feedback can make ICSI faster and less mentally taxing, potentially reducing procedural errors and operator fatigue. Published in IEEE Access and on arXiv, the work offers a practical step toward more intuitive micromanipulation in assisted reproduction and similar precision tasks.