Haptic feedback has been shown to benefit performance in various laparoscopic surgery tasks. However, providing haptic feedback to novice trainees in the early stages of training may be distracting. A controlled experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of haptic feedback on the learning curve of a complex laparoscopic suturing and knot-tying task. It was hypothesized that subjects would perform better and reach the first plateau in the learning curve earlier with haptics than without. Twenty novices participated in eighteen one-hour training sessions. Results indicated that training with haptics was not significantly different from training without haptics after five hours of practice. However, those who learned with haptic feedback were more consistent in their task performance and had a shorter learning curve. Therefore, haptic feedback may be omitted in a laparoscopic surgical simulator in early training provided that extensive training is possible.
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