TIKL: Development of a Wearable Vibrotactile Feedback Suit for Improved Human Motor Learning

TIKL: Development of a Wearable Vibrotactile Feedback Suit for Improved Human Motor Learning

Lieberman and Breazeal describe a suit that adds tactile feedback to the learning process for a user making arm gestures. The suit produces vibrations on the arm at positions that cause the user to feel like the suit is pushing his arm towards the desired position. Rotation of the arm is suggested by causing a vibration sequence around the arm. The arm of the user is tracked using a Vicon camera system that tracks targets on the arm and maps them to an arm model. The angle of the joints in this model are compared to a reference gesture, and the magnitude of the difference in angles causes a corresponding vibration in the suit. Once the users were accustomed to the suit, it improved their learning rate and their ability to mimic the taught gestures.

Discussion
Not much gesture recognition going on. The tracking could be adapted to an instance based classification system. Its use as a learning tool is interesting, and would be cool to try.

Reference

J. Lieberman & C. Breazeal (in press) "TIKL: Development of a Wearable Vibrotactile Feedback Suit for Improved Human Motor Learning". IEEE Transactions in Robotics (T-RO).