Telerobotic haptic system to assist the performance of occupational therapy tests by motion-impaired users

This paper describes the development of intelligent mapping from a haptic user interface to a remote manipulator to assist individuals with disabilities performing occupational therapy tasks. This mapping, referred to an assistance function, is determined on the basis of environmental model or sensory data to guide the motion of a telerobotic manipulator while performing a given task. Human input is enhanced rather than superseded by the computer. Three manual dexterity assessment tests, commonly used in the occupational therapy field, were chosen to implement the several forms of assistance functions designed to augment the human performance. The test bed used for these tasks consisted of a six-degree-of-freedom force-reflecting haptic interface device, PHANToM with the GHOST SDK software. This work is the continuation of the authors' previous work at the ICRA'02 [Pernalete, N, et al, 2002], in which only results of fully able individuals were presented. Two motion-impaired users with severe forms of muscular dystrophy and spinal cord injure, volunteered to participate in the experiments and their results are presented in this article. The results demonstrated that the forms of assistance provided reduced the execution times and increased the performance of the chosen tasks for the disabled individuals as well as they did for the fully-able persons. In addition, these results suggest that the introduction of the haptic rendering capabilities, including the force feedback, offers special benefit to motion-impaired users by augmenting their performance on job-related tasks.