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Haptic Cow at Britain’s Newest Vet School

THE HAPTIC COW is forming part of the first year curriculum for students at Britain’s first new school of veterinary medicine for fifty years at Nottingham University. The system, which draws on virtual touch, or haptics, was launched earlier this year by Virtalis working in collaboration with the system’s inventor, Sarah Baillie. The Haptic Cow enables students to carry out virtual rectal examinations on cows, with their movements being recorded on the instructor’s computer monitor

Jon Huxley, Associate Professor of Farm Animal Medicine at The University of Nottingham, explained: “We have had the luxury of designing our courses from scratch and decided that, as clinical skills are so hard to master, they should be introduced early in the course. As this is only our first year, our students are getting to do things that other, more traditional, courses don’t introduce until later years. We’ve found that, once the initial “you must be joking” reaction is over, the students are instantly won over by the system. In fact, I seem to remember sceptism was my first reaction too, but now I recognise the Haptic Cow for the extremely valuable learning experience it provides. It moves beyond teaching spatial orientation to deliver transferable skills that can be applied in tasks other than the rectal examination of cows.”

Haptic Cow at Nottingham University Haptic force feedback technology has been used to create a virtual bovine reproductive tract, positioned inside a seemingly empty fibreglass model of the rear half of a cow. The device that puts the haptics in the Haptic Cow is the PHANTOM from SensAble Technologies. This instrument makes it possible for users to touch and palpate virtual objects. In addition, because the cow’s organs are visible on the computer monitor, the instructor can see exactly what the student is doing and direct the movements. The Haptic Cow has a range of conditions the students can learn about and these are replicated at the touch of a button, whereas a student’s contact with such a variety of cases in real animals is necessarily chancier.