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Franck Norman
Drew Logsdon
The authors research ways to use real time tactile feedback, through a wearable robotic system. This way would be used along with verbal and visual feedback from the teacher. In a nutshell, the teacher and student will both be wearing a robotic feedback suit. A motion capture system will track movement for both. The software will see the deviation between the teacher and student and give the student feedback through the actuators placed on the skin. The joints that move in error will receive some feedback through the system proportional to the amount of error. The software has some equation it uses to determine that amount of error.
The experiment was run on 40 individuals divided into 2 groups: 1 that receives visual feedback, the other receives visual and tactile feedback. Both groups wear the suit to make sure the movements would be about the same. After 10 minutes of calibration, the user is shown a series of still images and told to mimic them. After that, 3-10 second motion videos are shown and they were told to mimic it. To study learning over time, the videos were repeated 6 times. Afterwards, they were given a questionnaire to fill out.
The questionnaire revealed that most users felt reasonably comfortable in the suit, but the tactile group needed to concentrate more. Over time, the tactile group stated that their ability to use the feedback improved. Some issues included discomfort in the sitting and elbow positioning. Most agreed that this was a good way to teach motor skills. The authors went on to a more math based analysis of their results.
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I think this is one of the best papers we've read to date, since they did a good analysis of the experiment, results, and future work. They admit certain pitfalls with their project, like that the setup would most likely be too expensive for every day use. However, they used this to prove their assertion that vibrotactile learning is much better than just visual or audio learning alone. Also, they did a good job of describing the aspects of their experiment and they split the groups into a test and control group. Overall, I think this is a good start to the line of research. I think it would be useful to reteach motor skills to people that just came off of injuries or lost the ability to do certain motor skills (i'm sure some medical conditions can cause this).
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Yes, there are millions of people undergoing physical therapy due to injuries and other medical conditions. This system could be used to help those people, especially those with mental injuries or disorders that might need some extra feedback.
ReplyDeleteI also liked the formality and thorough analysis the authors illustrate here. For that reason, and the awesomeness of vibrotactile clothes, I also think this is one of the best papers we have read.
The idea presented in the paper is really good. However, this concept would work better if the user wanted to learn one motor skill at a time. Feedback from more than one part of the body could be too confusing.
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