Misdiagnosis can result in delayed treatment and patient harm. Robotic patient simulators (robopatients) provide a controlled framework for training and evaluating clinicians in rare and complex cases. We investigate auditory tactile congruence in the synthesis of adaptive vocal pain expressions for robopatients. The system generates pain vocalizations in response to tactile stimuli applied during abdominal palpation. Haptic input is captured through an abdominal phantom and processed using an internal palpation-to-pain mapping model that drives acoustic output. To evaluate perceptual congruence between palpation force and synthesized pain expressions, we conducted a study comprising 7,680 trials with 20 participants. Participants rated perceived pain intensity based solely on auditory feedback. We analyzed the influence of acoustic parameters on agreement between applied force and perceived pain. Results indicate that amplitude and pitch significantly affect perceptual agreement, independent of pain sound category. Increased palpation force was associated with higher agreement ratings, consistent with psychophysical scaling effects. Among the tested acoustic features, pitch exerted a stronger influence than amplitude on perceived congruence. These findings demonstrate that modulation of pitch and amplitude is critical for achieving perceptually coherent auditory tactile mappings in robotic pain simulation. The proposed framework supports the development of high fidelity robotic patient simulators and provides a platform for studying multidimensional representations of pain in embodied robotic systems.

翻译：误诊可能导致治疗延误和患者伤害。机器人患者模拟器为罕见复杂病例的临床培训与评估提供了受控框架。本研究探讨听觉-触觉一致性在机器人患者自适应疼痛发声合成中的应用。该系统通过腹部触诊的触觉刺激生成疼痛发声。触觉输入通过腹部模型采集，并由内部触诊-疼痛映射模型处理后驱动声学输出。为评估触诊力与合成疼痛表达之间的感知一致性，我们开展了包含20名参与者、总计7,680次试验的研究。参与者仅根据听觉反馈评估感知疼痛强度。我们分析了声学参数对施加力与感知疼痛间一致性的影响。结果表明：振幅和音高显著影响感知一致性，且与疼痛声音类别无关；增强的触诊力与更高的一致性评分相关，符合心理物理标度效应；在测试的声学特征中，音高对感知一致性的影响强于振幅。这些发现证明，音高和振幅的调制对于实现机器人疼痛模拟中感知连贯的听觉-触觉映射至关重要。所提框架支持高保真机器人患者模拟器的开发，并为研究具身机器人系统中疼痛的多维表征提供了平台。