Haptics: The Science of Touch As a Foundational Pathway to Precision Education and Assessment

Clinical touch is the cornerstone of the doctor-patient relationship and can impact patient experience and outcomes. In the current era, driven by an ever-increasing infusion of point-of-care technologies, physical exam skills have become undervalued. Moreover, touch and hands-on skills have been difficult to teach due to inaccurate assessments and difficulty with learning transfer through observation. In this article, the authors argue that haptics, the science of touch, provides a unique opportunity to explore new pathways to facilitate touch training. Furthermore, haptics can dramatically increase the density of touch-based assessments without increasing human rater burden-essential for realizing precision assessment. The science of haptics is reviewed, including the benefits of using haptics-informed language for objective structured clinical examinations. The authors describe how haptic devices and haptic language have and can be used to facilitate learning, communication, documentation and a much-needed reinvigoration of physical examination, and touch excellence at the point of care. The synergy of haptic devices, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality environments are discussed. The authors conclude with challenges of scaling haptic technology in medical education, such as cost and translational needs, and opportunities to achieve wider adoption of this transformative approach to precision education.