Preliminary testing by adults of a haptics-assisted robot platform designed for children with physical impairments to access play

Abstract

Development of children's cognitive and perceptual skills depends heavily on object exploration and experience in their physical world. For children who have severe physical impairments, one of the biggest concerns is the loss of opportunities for meaningful play with objects, including physical contact and manipulation. Assistive robots can enable children to perform object manipulation through the control of simple interfaces. Touch sensations conveyed through haptic interfaces in the form of force reflection or force assistance can help a child to sense the environment and to control a robot. A robotic system with forbidden region virtual fixtures (VFs) was tested in an object sorting task. Three sorting tasks-by color, by shape, and by both color and shape-were performed by 10 adults without disability and one adult with cerebral palsy. Tasks performed with VFs were accomplished faster than tasks performed without VFs, and deviations of the motion area were smaller with VFs than without VFs. For the participant with physical impairments, two out of three tasks were slower with the VFs. This implies that forbidden region VFs are not always able to improve user task performance. Alignment with an individual's unique motion characteristics can improve VF assistance.

Using a robotic teleoperation system for haptic exploration

“…In this study the participant had no known sensory impairment, but additional modifications in the system would be needed to amplify or reduce sensations to address the needs of individuals with impairments in sensation. The design of haptic robots to provide compensation to accomplish functional tasks is not as frequently studied as haptic robots for assistance or resistance for exercise therapy, but one study where an individual with cerebral palsy performed an object sorting task determined that the system needed to consider the individual's preferred trajectory pattern, 18 which may interfere with EP patterns.…”

Augmented Reality Plant & Animal Cells: Design and Evaluation of an Educational Augmented Reality Application

“…Participants for this study were recruited from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, using convenience sampling. The selected user sample aligns with other usability studies in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) that conduct preliminary usability analyses with a more convenient population (Sakamaki et al, 2018). Participants were all current students at the university.…”

Preliminary testing of eye gaze interfaces for controlling a haptic system intended to support play in children with physical impairments: Attentive versus explicit interfaces

“…FRVF can also be helpful in tasks such as sorting, by guiding users from one location to another, for example, along a cylindrical space. 9 Forbidden region virtual fixtures are intended to reduce the time and area covered by individual’s movements, and reduce unintended movements produced by spasticity in people with physical impairments.…”