Abstract
This paper presents a haptic system that is conceived to support the design process of a class of products or services in order to make them more accessible to people affected by hand tremor diseases. The main aim is to foster the designer empathy allowing her/him to directly feel the effect of the impairment in first person. Specifically, a desktop haptic device is employed to induce a programmable hand-tremor, that is typically observed in people affected by some kind of neurological diseases, on healthy subjects (i.e., the designers). The developed tool is based on a wrist-attached haptic interface with a workspace that is comparable to that of the arm of the user. Such device is able to exert controlled forces on the user's wrist and induces a hand-tremor whose frequency and amplitude are correlated with those measured on impaired people. The control of the device is based on a custom trajectory-tracking algorithm that takes as input tremor signals that are acquired on patients using an optical motion tracking system. In this paper, we present the employed haptic system, the structure of the control system and the experimental validation of the controller done through the acquisition of data on six patients affected by Parkinson's disease.
Highlights
THE verification of usability and acceptance of end-users is a fundamental step in the design process of successful products/services
We present the procedure that we adopted for the identification of the dynamic properties of the overall mechanical system composed by the GRAB device attached to the forearm of a healthy subject through the novel end-effector
A haptic interface was successfully employed in the task of simulating/inducing on healthy subjects a hand-tremor that is similar to that observed on subject with certain types neurological syndrome
Summary
THE verification of usability and acceptance of end-users is a fundamental step in the design process of successful products/services. The simulation of disabilities has been studied for visual impairments in the field of web-design and word processor software, with the development of simple software tools in [4], [5] and of a dedicated system for the design of accessible user interfaces based on EmD principles in [6]. In this context, we propose a novel interactive application in which a kinesthetic haptic device is employed on able people to elicit sensations that are commonly felt by those affected by particular forms of neurological motor. The rest of the paper is dedicated to the presentation of new original contents
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