A Suction-Based Peripheral Nerve Gripper Capable of Controlling the Suction Force

Abstract

Measuring and controlling the force required to grip a nerve is required to avoid any undesired neurological damage caused by an excessive suction force applied to the tissue. We aimed to develop a suction-based nerve gripper that can measure the suction force applied to the gripped peripheral nerve. A tiny force sensor can be incorporated by casting a soft material on a barometric pressure sensor chip and embedding it in the suction tip. In this study, a suction tip was designed based on a parametric analysis. The sensing characteristics and performance were evaluated experimentally. The experimental results demonstrate that a suction tip exhibits a force measurement capacity of approximately 2.8 N with a controlled suction force at 0.1 N intervals. The practical applicability of the proposed gripper was assessed based on an in vivo experiment performed on small animal subjects.