Abstract
Cutaneous sensory feedback can be used to provide additional sensory cues to a person performing a motor task where vision is a dominant feedback signal. A haptic joystick has been widely used to guide a user by providing force feedback. However, the benefit of providing force feedback is still debatable due to performance dependency on factors such as the user's skill-level, task difficulty. Meanwhile, recent studies have shown the feasibility of improving a motor task performance by providing skin-stretch feedback. Therefore, a combination of two aforementioned feedback types is deemed to be promising to promote synergistic effects to consistently improve the person's motor performance. In this study, we aimed at identifying the effect of the combined haptic and skin-stretch feedbacks on the aged person's driving motor performance. For the experiment, 15 healthy elderly subjects (age 72.8 ± 6.6 years) were recruited and were instructed to drive a virtual power-wheelchair through four different courses with obstacles. Four augmented sensory feedback conditions were tested: no feedback, force feedback, skin-stretch feedback, and a combination of both force and skin-stretch feedbacks. While the haptic force was provided to the hand by the joystick, the skin-stretch was provided to the steering forearm by a custom-designed wearable skin-stretch device. We tested two hypotheses: (i) an elderly individual's motor control would benefit from receiving information about a desired trajectory from multiple sensory feedback sources, and (ii) the benefit does not depend on task difficulty. Various metrics related to skills and safety were used to evaluate the control performance. Repeated measure ANOVA was performed for those metrics with two factors: task scenario and the type of the augmented sensory feedback. The results revealed that elderly subjects' control performance significantly improved when the combined feedback of both haptic force and skin-stretch feedback was applied. The proposed approach suggest the feasibility to improve people's task performance by the synergistic effects of multiple augmented sensory feedback modalities.
Highlights
For the past one decade, augmentation of sensory feedback has been widely used to improve peoples’ task performance related to the activities of daily living (Sigrist et al, 2013)
The objectives of this study are (i) to examine the synergistic effects between two haptic sensory feedback modalities, i.e., force feedback to the hand and cutaneous skin stretch feedback on the steering forearm, (ii) and observe if the synergistic effects are consistent throughout various scenarios
Significance level was set to p < 0.05, and multiple pairwise comparisons were adjusted by Bonferroni correction. We present both the main and the interaction effects of two independent factors, task scenario and augmented sensory feedback, on the subjects’ performance, quality of achievement (M1), minimum distance to obstacle (M2), mean deviation from reference trajectory (M3), and the summation of average task completion time (M4)
Summary
For the past one decade, augmentation of sensory feedback has been widely used to improve peoples’ task performance related to the activities of daily living (Sigrist et al, 2013). A haptic lever is one of the most commonly-used interfaces providing a force feedback to attract the user toward the safer or the desired directions while driving a power-wheelchair (Crespo and Reinkensmeyer, 2008; Marchal-Crespo et al, 2010a; Yoon et al, 2017) or assisting target-pointing/hitting tasks (Powell and O’Malley, 2012; Fisher et al, 2015; Patton and Huang, 2016). Several devices have been developed to provide realistic three dimensional tactile sensation to the user, e.g., touching a flat surface, grasping a virtual object, and tipping a surface or an object (Chinello et al, 2012; Prattichizzo et al, 2013; Pacchierotti et al, 2015)
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