MEASURING REGULARITY OF FINE UPPER LIMB MOVEMENTS WITH A HAPTIC PLATFORM FOR MOTOR LEARNING AND REHABILITATION
Keywords:
haptics, motor skill learning, force fields, movement regularityAbstract
Robot-assisted systems for arm training are being increasingly used to target moderate-to-severe upper limb impairments in rehabilitation facilities, while hand fine motor skills are seldom being targeted by these machines. This manuscript describes and tests the feasibility of a system based on a haptic interface aimed to complement the efficacy of robotic training in the rehabilitation and motor learning associated with upper extremities movements. End-effector kinematics associated with different trajectory tasks performed by 11 healthy adults were used to extract measures of smoothness, under different testing conditions that included the presence or absence of visual and haptic feedback, the use of dominant vs. non dominant hand, different shapes (crosses and circles), and the verse with which movements were done. The normalized mean square jerk, extracted from the system together with specific speed parameters, was able to capture differences in regularity between the different shapes (MSJratio significantly higher when drawing crosses, p < 1.0 E-4), and that haptic feedback significantly influences this smoothness measure (MSJratio significantly higher when haptic feedback is present, p < 5.0 E-4). The proposed system may be used as a means to monitor the progress of movement regularity in robot-mediated therapy, and the results obtained experimentally highlight the influence of haptic feedback on the smoothness of finalized upper extremity fine movements.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2017 Baldassarre D’Elia, Ivan Bernabucci, Daniele Bibbo, Silvia Conforto, Tommaso D’Alessio, Salvatore A. Sciuto, Andrea Scorza, Maurizio Schmid
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of the first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in CTJ.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website or ResearchGate) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges.
CTJ requires that all of the content of the manuscript has been created by its respective authors or that permission to use a copyrighted material has been obtained by the authors before submitting the manuscript to CTJ. CTJ requires that authors have not used any copyrighted material illegally, as for example a picture from another journal or book, a photo, etc. It is the author’s responsibility to use only materials not violating the copyright law. When in doubt, CTJ may ask the authors to supply the pertinent permission or agreement about the use of a copyrighted material.
The opinions expressed in CTJ articles are those of authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers or the Czech Society for Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics.