Abstract
People learn motor activities best when they are conscious of their errors and make a concerted effort to correct them. While haptic interfaces can facilitate motor training, existing interfaces are often bulky and do not always ensure post‐training skill retention. Herein, a programmable haptic sleeve composed of textile‐based electroadhesive clutches for skill acquisition and retention is described. Its functionality in a motor learning study where users control a drone's movement using elbow joint rotation is shown. Haptic feedback is used to restrain elbow motion and make users aware of their errors. This helps users consciously learn to avoid errors from occurring. While all subjects exhibited similar performance during the baseline phase of motor learning, those subjects who received haptic feedback from the haptic sleeve committed 23.5% fewer errors than subjects in the control group during the evaluation phase. The results show that the sleeve helps users retain and transfer motor skills better than visual feedback alone. This work shows the potential for fabric‐based haptic interfaces as a training aid for motor tasks in the fields of rehabilitation and teleoperation.
Highlights
People learn motor activities best when they are conscious of their errors and make a concerted effort to correct them
We experimentally show that the proposed haptic interface increases the training success to learn, retain, and transfer motor skills in a drone teleoperation task
The experiments consisted of two drone teleoperation tasks—path following to examine the effect of haptic training on the retention of motor skills and waypoint navigation to determine the transfer of those skills (Figure 2A)
Summary
The electroadhesive haptic sleeve is a fabric-based exoskeleton that can be programmed to constrain elbow extension and flexion It is composed of two electroadhesive clutches and three body attachments (Figure 1A, Figure S1, Supporting Information). The perception of the haptic feedback is quantified by the magnitude of the holding force of the EA clutches This magnitude is dependent on the dimension of the clutch plates, the dielectric thickness, the number of the clutch pairs, and the applied voltage. The ventral and dorsal clutches are worn by placing them between body attachments that are anchored to the forearm, the elbow joint, and the upper arm (Figure 1D, Movie S1, Supporting Information). Two inertial measurement units (IMU, by Xsens Technologies) are attached to the forearm and upper arm body attachments to measure the elbow angle
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