To administer ophthalmic anesthesia, before injecting the anesthetic, it is essential to palpate, sense and ensure that the point of injection is correct. Hence, a training system for ophthalmic anaesthesia must include the features of assessing whether a trainee had performed palpation correctly and had inserted the needle at the appropriate position. In this paper, a system that uses a flexible membrane potentiometer for location sensing and a load-cell for sensing the palpation force is proposed to assess palpation. A modified successive approximation register (SAR) based digital converter functions as a simple analog to digital converter for converting the voltage output of the load cell. The converter additionally serves as a direct resistance to digital converter to measure the position indicated by a flexible membrane potentiometer. A method of computation that provides a palpation safety score, presented here, helps a trainee to review the training session in the training mode and assists the instructor to evaluate a trainee in the assessment mode. A prototype unit built and tested validates the presented technique. The location sensor of the prototype possesses a worst-case error of 0.8%, and the force sensor is found to have a worst-case error of 0.7 %. © 2001-2012 IEEE.