Proposed Eye-Hand Correlation Assessment System: A Novel Approach for Evaluating Coordination

Abstract

Post-stroke patients often experience difficulties with hand-eye coordination, resulting in reduced perceptual accuracy and finger dexterity. These impairments can significantly impact their overall quality of life. This study introduces a new eye-hand correlation assessment system with enhanced assessment metrics for evaluating coordination and upper limb disability. It utilizes a robotic haptic system and correlates eye-gaze with hand and arm movements. The experimental setup integrates a haptic device, eye tracker, and four inertial sensors to measure the upper limb joint angles displacement. The user performs various hand movement patterns in a virtual environment while data is simultaneously collected from the hand, eye, and arm movements. A metric for eye-hand coordination based on the Pearson coefficient has been developed (EHCM) and correlated with the upper limb movements, to detect possible upper limb disabilities. The system was tested with ten healthy volunteers, one of which had a type of upper-limb disability. Most of the EHCM scores showed a very strong correlation for those users without upper-limb disability or known eye-hand coordination problems. Also, the proposed system was preliminary tested with post-stroke patients to identify the limitations and weak points. More tests will be conducted to validate this metric as well as correlate it with a CNN classifier for detecting incorrect wrist-upper limb movements. The main objective of this work was to develop an evaluation tool that assists therapists in quantifying collected data from robot therapy, for assessing the degree of disability in patients.INDEX TERMS eye-gaze, eye-hand coordination metric, eye-hand correlation system, haptic device, upper limb movements I. INTRODUCTIONT HE human hand is one of the most complex organs, which gives us the ability to interact with the environment in an easy way and perform a variety of actions. From delicate tasks like writing to more robust ones like carrying a bag, the hand is an essential part of everyone's daily activities. However, injuries, disabilities, and neurological conditions often impair its function, significantly affecting a person's quality of life.According to the World Health Organization [1] , on average, 15 million people worldwide suffer from a stroke each year. Out of this number, more than 5 million people are left permanently or partially disabled, making it one of the common causes of upper-limb disabilities. Hand rehabilitation has become an increasingly important field of physical therapy, with the aim of improving hand function, reducing pain and stiffness, and enhancing overall mobility and dexterity.Eye-hand coordination refers to the ability of our visual system to coordinate the information received through the eyes in order to control, guide, and direct the movements of the arms and hands when performing a given task. Research has shown that repeatedly practicing specific tasks can enhance motor skills and contribute to motor recovery. However, in many cases, therapy for...