Development and Testing of a Wearable Vibrotactile Haptic Feedback System for Proprioceptive Rehabilitation

Abstract

The human sense of touch is an integral part of daily life. For tasks involving grasping and manipulation of objects, force feedback is a key requirement. Most of the systems give contact point or complete grasping force feedback; for precision grasping and other physical interactions, finger awareness and force feedback from independent fingers is essential. In this study a novel, wearable proprioceptive rehabilitation system is designed which restores the ability of identifying and distinguishing between individual fingers of a prosthetic hand or an exoskeleton in a non-invasive manner. Moreover, it provides different levels of force feedback from every finger as well, which enables the user to distinguish and control force in precision grasping activities. For testing the system accuracy, classical psychophysical methods were used on a group of 14 voluntary disabled subjects. The tests were conducted in both, ideal and real-world conditions i.e. without and with distractions and accuracies were calculated accordingly. A p-test was also conducted to observe significance between the samples of with and without distraction datasets. The system performed with an overall accuracy of 82.04% which was well above the min. performance measure of 60%. Vi-HaB is standalone system and can be mounted on any upper limb rehabilitation (prosthesis, exoskeleton) system for finger awareness and force feedback.

Smart Tactile Gloves for Haptic Interaction, Communication, and Rehabilitation

“…Some VR/AR smart gloves, including those for rehabilitation, with integrated sensors for tactile feedback are shown in Figure 7a. [132][133][134][135] They have been used to display different tactile information, including temperature. A VR system that utilized a wearable glove with force sensors and an arm band with a vibration motor has been used to conduct experiments with children affected by cerebral palsy.…”

“…A VR system that utilized a wearable glove with force sensors and an arm band with a vibration motor has been used to conduct experiments with children affected by cerebral palsy. [133] Because this system was compliant with different levels of motor skills, it allowed patients to complete the experimental rehabilitation session with performance varying according to the expected motor abilities. A skin-like thermal device for recreating thermal sensation in VR has been reported.…”

Posture-based Golf Swing Instruction using Multi-modal Feedback

“…In addition, the Vi-HaB [17] stated that when the user is not looking directly at the vibrator and the tactile feedback is provided, the accuracy in discriminating the vibrating parts increases. Implying that the vibration feedback is useful for learning the golf swing.…”

A Novel Untethered Hand Wearable with Fine-Grained Cutaneous Haptic Feedback

“…Cutaneous feedback can be in the form of vibration produced by mini-vibration motors [12][13][14][15][16], skin stretch or tangential motion to the skin [17], and tactile displays that produce tapping motion creating vertical movements towards the skin forming a matrix of tactile pixels (taxel) [18] that triggers tactile mechanoreceptors: Meissner's corpuscles and Merkel's cells that are sensitive to edge pressure and flutter tap as reported by Visell [19]. Tactile matrix displays are often used as vision substitution but can also be used as a tactile augmentation to a vision system similar to in VR and telerobotics applications.…”