Natural Hand Movements Research Articles

Robotic-Assisted Neck Dissection Through a Pre- and Post-auricular Hairline Incision: Preclinical Study

The introduction of robotics in head and neck surgery has facilitated access to the contents of the neck region using less cosmetically obtrusive incisions. Robotic systems offer a three-dimensional viewing, tremor filtration, and articulating distal arms that mimic natural hand and wrist movements. We hypothesized that these characteristics would allow for the performance of a robotic-assisted selective and comprehensive neck dissection via combined pre- and post-auricular incisions. We were able to demonstrate adequate access in a cadaver, using a combination of conventional, endoscopic, and robotic surgical manipulation. Thus preclinical cadaver studies support the ability to perform robotic-assisted neck dissection via combined pre- and post-auricular incisions.

Graph Drawing Aesthetics—Created by Users, Not Algorithms

Prior empirical work on layout aesthetics for graph drawing algorithms has concentrated on the interpretation of existing graph drawings. We report on experiments which focus on the creation and layout of graph drawings: participants were asked to draw graphs based on adjacency lists, and to lay them out "nicely." Two interaction methods were used for creating the drawings: a sketch interface which allows for easy, natural hand movements, and a formal point-and-click interface similar to a typical graph editing system. We find, in common with many other studies, that removing edge crossings is the most significant aesthetic, but also discover that aligning nodes and edges to an underlying grid is important. We observe that the aesthetics favored by participants during creation of a graph drawing are often not evident in the final product and that the participants did not make a clear distinction between the processes of creation and layout. Our results suggest that graph drawing systems should integrate automatic layout with the user's manual editing process, and provide facilities to support grid-based graph creation.

Design, Development, and Validation of a Take-Home Simulator for Fundamental Laparoscopic Skills: Using Nintendo Wii® for Surgical Training

Assuring quality surgical trainees within the confines of reduced work hours mandates reassessment of educational paradigms. Surgical simulators have been shown to be effective in teaching surgical residents, but their use is limited by cost and time constraints. The Nintendo Wii gaming console is inexpensive and allows natural hand movements similar to those performed in laparoscopy to guide game play. We hypothesize that surgical skills can be improved through take-home simulators adapted from affordable off-the-shelf gaming consoles. A total of 21 surgical residents participated in a prospective, controlled study. An experimental group of 14 surgical residents was assigned to play Marble Mania on the Nintendo Wii using a unique physical controller that interfaces with the WiiMote controller followed by a simulated electrocautery task. Seven residents assigned to the control group performed the electrocautery task without playing the game first. When compared with the control group, the experimental group performed the task with fewer errors and superior movement proficiency (P < 0.05). The experimental group demonstrated increased ambidexterity with improvement in proficiency of the nondominant hand over time. In conclusion, the Nintendo Wii gaming device along with Marble Mania serves as an effective take-home surgical simulator.

대규모 인터랙티브 디스플레이 환경에서의 멀티 공간 인터랙션 인터페이스

The interactive display is providing various interaction modes to users through various ubiquitous computing technologies. These methods were studied for their interactions, but the limits that it is provided to only single user and the device usability were generated. In this paper, we propose a new type of spatial multi interaction interface that provide the various spatial touch interactive to multi users in the ambient display environment. Therefore, we generate the interaction surface so that a user can interact through the IR-LEDs Array Bar installed in the ceiling of the ambient display environment. At this time, a user can experience the various interactions through the spatial touch in an interaction surface. Consequently, this system offers the interactive display and interface method that the users can interact through natural hand movement without the portable devices.

Generating CG Animation of Natural Hand Motion in Playing a Piano

Generating CG Animation of Natural Hand Motion in Playing a Piano

Using Simulation Speeds to Differentiate Controller Interface Concepts

This study investigated two concepts: (1) whether speeding a human-in-the-loop simulation (or the subject's “world”) scales time stress in such a way as to cause primary task performance to reveal workload differences between experimental conditions and (2) whether using natural hand motions to control the attitude of an aircraft makes controlling the aircraft easier and more intuitive. This was accomplished by having pilots and non-pilots make altitude and heading changes using three different control inceptors at three simulation speeds. Results indicate that simulation speed does affect workload and controllability. The bank and pitch angle error was affected by simulation speed but not by a simulation speed by controller type interaction; this may have been due to the relatively easy flying task. Results also indicate that pilots could control the bank and pitch angle of an aircraft about equally as well with the glove as with the sidestick. Non-pilots approached the pilots' ability to control the bank and pitch angle of an aircraft using the positional glove – where the hand angle is directly proportional to the commanded aircraft angle. Therefore, (1) changing the simulation speed lends itself to objectively indexing a subject's workload and may also aid in differentiating among interface concepts based upon performance if the task being studied is sufficiently challenging and (2) using natural body movements to mimic the movement of an airplane for attitude control is feasible.

APLIKASI TIGA DIMENSI VIRTUAL DENGAN MENGGUNAKAN 5DT DATA GLOVE 5 ULTRA

One of active area in information technology research is development of virtual reality (VR). It is a technology which can simulate real world activities in a virtual world. Virtual reality consists of software and hardware which is usually in the form of device that captures human movement. Then VR sends signal of that movement to computer. The signal will be received and processed and shown on the screen, so that the movement can be simulated. In this research, we develop an application that can receive hand movement input with 5DT Data Glove 5 Ultra and create natural and accurate hand movement animation output for hand opening closing and other gestures. Experiments show that there are some gestures though have different physical shapes but are recognized as the same gestures because of sensor limitation in data glove.

The statistics of natural hand movements

Humans constantly use their hands to interact with the environment and they engage spontaneously in a wide variety of manual activities during everyday life. In contrast, laboratory-based studies of hand function have used a limited range of predefined tasks. The natural movements made by the hand during everyday life have thus received little attention. Here, we developed a portable recording device that can be worn by subjects to track movements of their right hand as they go about their daily routine outside of a laboratory setting. We analyse the kinematic data using various statistical methods. Principal component analysis of the joint angular velocities showed that the first two components were highly conserved across subjects, explained 60% of the variance and were qualitatively similar to those reported in previous studies of reach-to-grasp movements. To examine the independence of the digits, we developed a measure based on the degree to which the movements of each digit could be linearly predicted from the movements of the other four digits. Our independence measure was highly correlated with results from previous studies of the hand, including the estimated size of the digit representations in primary motor cortex and other laboratory measures of digit individuation. Specifically, the thumb was found to be the most independent of the digits and the index finger was the most independent of the fingers. These results support and extend laboratory-based studies of the human hand.

Multidigit Movement Synergies of the Human Hand in an Unconstrained Haptic Exploration Task

Although the human hand has a complex structure with many individual degrees of freedom, joint movements are correlated. Studies involving simple tasks (grasping) or skilled tasks (typing or finger spelling) have shown that a small number of combined joint motions (i.e., synergies) can account for most of the variance in observed hand postures. However, those paradigms evoked a limited set of hand postures and as such the reported correlation patterns of joint motions may be task-specific. Here, we used an unconstrained haptic exploration task to evoke a set of hand postures that is representative of most naturalistic postures during object manipulation. Principal component analysis on this set revealed that the first seven principal components capture >90% of the observed variance in hand postures. Further, we identified nine eigenvectors (or synergies) that are remarkably similar across multiple subjects and across manipulations of different sets of objects within a subject. We then determined that these synergies are used broadly by showing that they account for the changes in hand postures during other tasks. These include hand motions such as reach and grasp of objects that vary in width, curvature and angle, and skilled motions such as precision pinch. Our results demonstrate that the synergies reported here generalize across tasks, and suggest that they represent basic building blocks underlying natural human hand motions.

Analyzing and capturing articulated hand motion in image sequences

Capturing the human hand motion from video involves the estimation of the rigid global hand pose as well as the nonrigid finger articulation. The complexity induced by the high degrees of freedom of the articulated hand challenges many visual tracking techniques. For example, the particle filtering technique is plagued by the demanding requirement of a huge number of particles and the phenomenon of particle degeneracy. This paper presents a novel approach to tracking the articulated hand in video by learning and integrating natural hand motion priors. To cope with the finger articulation, this paper proposes a powerful sequential Monte Carlo tracking algorithm based on importance sampling techniques, where the importance function is based on an initial manifold model of the articulation configuration space learned from motion-captured data. In addition, this paper presents a divide-and-conquer strategy that decouples the hand poses and finger articulations and integrates them in an iterative framework to reduce the complexity of the problem. Our experiments show that this approach is effective and efficient for tracking the articulated hand. This approach can be extended to track other articulated targets.

Language in hand: why sign came before speech

William C. Stokoe offers here in his final book his formula for the development of language in humans: gesture-to-language-to-speech. He refutes the recently entrenched principles that humans have a special, innate learning faculty for language and that speech equates with language. Integrating current findings in linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology, Stokoe fashions a closely-reasoned argument that suggests how our human ancestors' powers of observation and natural hand movements could have evolved into signed morphemes. Stokoe also proposes how the primarily gestural expression of language with vocal support shifted to primarily vocal language with gestural accompaniment. When describing this transition, however, he never loses sight of the significance of humans in the natural world and the role of environmental stimuli in the development of language. Stokoe illustrates this contention with fascinating observations of small, contemporary ethnic groups such as the Assiniboin Nakotas, a Native American group from Montana. Stokoe concludes Language in Hand with an hypothesis on how the acceptance of sign language as the first language of humans could revolutionize the education of infants, both deaf and hearing, who, like early humans, have the full capacity for language without speech.

FMRI studies of the sensory and motor areas involved in movement.

A wide range of natural hand movements such as grasping, exploring or manipulating objects activates a parietal-premotor network upstream of motor cortex. The specific representations of each motor act are embedded in this circuitry and reflect the demands imposed by the sensory and motor processes involved in these motor behaviours including oculomotor and attentional control and memory processes. Further, the same network is activated during the observation or imagination of these movements. These complex intertwined and partially overlapping functional maps can be segregated in the time domain by means of real time techniques such as MEG that allow to disentangle the sequential processing stages.

Alterations of natural hand movements after interruption of fasciculus cuneatus in the macaque.

As part of a series of investigations on the control of fine finger movements in the macaque, spontaneous use of the hand in grooming, scratching, and manipulation was observed before and after interruption of fasciculus cuneatus (FC). Videotaped observations were made of four stumptail macaques (Macaca arctoides) living outdoors in social groups. The monkeys were followed for 1 to 3 years postoperatively. For the first 2 weeks following surgery, all monkeys neglected the affected hand and did not use it for support, locomotion, climbing, scratching, foraging, or grooming. Recovery of gross arm and hand movements occurred over a 1- to 3-month period. All the monkeys eventually used the hand for support, climbing, and object manipulation, but fine control of the fingers did not recover. Also, there was an apparent hypotonia of the fingers, imparting a "floppy" appearance to the hand. The animals coped with the loss of fine control by decreasing the frequency of some behaviors, eliminating others, and developing alternative strategies. Exploratory movements that were utilized for investigating the anogenital area or foraging for small food items were eliminated by FC interruption. There were obvious deficits in grip formation and grasp of small food objects (see Glendinning et al., this issue), but effects on similar movements during grooming only became obvious after repeated inspection of videotaped records. Self-scratching and sweeps of the hand in grooming were preserved but altered in form and frequency. The component movements in these behaviors were relatively uncoordinated, and the fingers were splayed (abducted). Often the hand was formed in a rigid posture throughout the sweeping motion, and the fingers did not stroke the skin individually. Frame-by-frame analysis of videotapes revealed that the morphology of the precision grip during grooming, in movements termed "plucks," was permanently altered. Preoperatively, the monkeys kept the index finger and thumb closely apposed and routinely made contact on the distal surfaces of the digits, as has been described for precision grip in humans. Postoperatively, this relationship was altered. The index finger frequently missed the thumb tip and made contact on the proximal part of the phalanx, or missed the thumb altogether. Thus, the dorsal column input is important for proprioceptive guidance of movements that achieve "tactile foveation," when objects or surfaces are actively contacted by the receptive areas of keenest sensitivity (on the fingertips).