2D motion coordination enhancement for ‘Ataxia’ impaired users using a haptic device

Abstract

This paper examines the application of a force feedback interface to minimize the effect of the pathological absence of control on the upper limb motion of impaired users. The haptic device used in this research is a two degree of freedom (DOF) Pantograph planar device. Force sensing is employed to detect the user indentation of motion while assistive impedance based techniques were used to develop a clumsy motion suppression control system. The erratic motion suppression techniques and the experimental system setup were evaluated in two dimensional tracking tasks using a human subject with failure of the gross coordination of the upper limb muscle movements resulted by a disorder named dasiaMuscle Ataxiapsila. The preliminary results obtained from these experiments depict that the proposed system can be used to enhance the motion coordination for muscle ataxia impaired subjects in two dimensional tracking tasks, similar to computer mouse interactions.