There's nothing tidy about sticking your arm deep into a cow's backside, getting up to your elbows in warm and gooey bovine innards.

But for new vet students, there's no avoiding the procedure: To diagnose pregnancy or check for infection, you've got to reach into a cow's rectum and feel for the uterus, ovaries and stomach. Unfortunately, proper palpation is a tough skill to teach, because once your arm is buried inside a cow butt, no one can see what you're doing.

That's why veterinarian and computer scientist Sarah Baillie has created the "Haptic Cow," a virtual, touch-feedback device that mimics the feeling of real bovine anatomy, placed inside a fiberglass model of a cow's rear end.

"With this technology, students can feel something that feels like the inside of a real cow, but I or another instructor can be following their movements on a monitor," said Baillie, who teaches at the Royal Veterinary College in London. "This means we can say, 'Come back a bit or go left a bit.' It actually means you can direct them."

Not only can professors follow a student's exact movements and critique the technique, but they can also keep track of how much force is being applied. If a fledgling vet gets too rough and exceeds the number of Newtons considered safe by experienced vets, virtual Bessie will belt out a cautionary "Moo-oo!"

Baillie first came up with the idea for the virtual cow several years ago, after an injury forced her to leave veterinary practice and retrain in computer science. She'd spent years trying to teach students how to palpate cows on the farm, so when she learned about touch-feedback technology that could simulate the feel of human anatomy, she recognized a perfect opportunity to blend her two careers.

"It took me a long time to get it right," Baillie said. "It would be no underestimate to say that the code that creates the feel has been iterated on hundreds of times. But when I got it right, I knew it was right, because I've actually felt the inside of a cow many, many times."

The current model of the Haptic Cow uses a touch feedback device from SensAble Technologies, hooked up to a computer that's programmed to deliver just the right amount of force in response to a student's touch. Instructors can set up different scenarios to help students learn the difference between the soft sensation of a healthy pregnant uterus and the firmer, doughier feel of an infected animal.

The virtual cow has been incredibly successful, and it's now being used by four of the seven veterinary colleges in the United Kingdom. Baillie was recently named "Most Innovative Teacher of the Year" in the U.K. by the 2009 Times Higher Education Awards, and the organization called her project "possibly the most significant innovation in veterinary education in the past 50 years."

But Baillie's not yet content— in addition to trying to commercialize her cow for use in the United States and Canada, she's also working on a Haptic Horse and a Haptic Cat.

"It’s particularly good for cats," she said, "as they have a certain limit to their tolerance."

Image: A vet student practices on the Haptic Cow, while Sarah Baillie and a real cow look on. Courtesy of Sarah Baillie/Royal Veterinary College.

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