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It's harder to train in the sense that there's less data for grounding. On the other hand, we can cheaply make robot fingertips with superhuman tactile resolution, and if anyone bothered, it'd be easy to train a model (riding on top of some multimodal LM, probably?) on general tactile recognition in reality and simulation, and then finetune it in the clinical setting. This isn't very different from how humans are trained. How many hours of palpation did you do in your life? It's a minor addition to your general manual skill. And even if sample efficiency turns out to be abysmal in comparison, two hundred hands at $1000 a pop, over a year, do not amount to even one American GP's compensation. Granted, proper hands are for now much more expensive, mostly due to small-scale production (which in turn is explained by worthless software), but I expect this to be solved rapidly once Tesla Optimus, 1X and other robots enter the market.
Actually sounds like a cool project for the developing world (@self_made_human, what do you think?). Might even increase the diagnostic value of tactile assessment. Too bad we can't have nice things.
I expect to be (un?)pleasantly surprised, but how well do you think robots (now, or will in the near future) integrate proprioceptive input and movement with tactile data?
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I think your attempt to ping me failed somehow, I had to dig down to find this.
In terms of utility in the 3rd world, I would wager that the reason more investment hasn't been made into tactile medical robotics is because of how redundant palpation etc have become in the modern age of imaging. Back in the day, they simply didn't have anything better, and now, due to both technical advances and fear of litigation, it's only used as a screening tool before actual investigations like xrays or USGs.
I would think in the contexts where you managed to setup a clinic with robots that could do touch assessments, it wouldn't be particularly hard to just have a token human do the same. If such functionality came downstream of other useful things such a bot could do, that might work, but the need for a robot that purely does palpation seems rather limited to me.
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