Haptics Assisted Training (HAT) System for children's handwriting

We present Haptics Assisted Training (HAT) System, a force feedback workstation for transferring and improving handwriting skill. The HAT system is the first practical handwriting training system whose usability was tested both in typical and special education classrooms of a local school district. Simulating the role of occupational therapists (OT), the HAT system guides the user's hand along the sequence of strokes of the reference handwriting recorded by an expert or teacher. Since the handwriting data is formatted as a set of ordered paths, it can teach any form of pen strokes, such as words, shapes, and even drawings. Training tasks are presented as a 3D game which captures children's attention and more effective visual motor integration (VMI) is anticipated than traditional paper materials. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the prototype. We also report a comparative study on handwriting performance of twenty participants grouped into four categories by education types (special vs. typical) and haptic devices (Phantom Omni™ vs. Novint Falcon™). As a result, we observed that the children quickly adjusted themselves to the system, and they sustained engagement at the word-writing tasks without any intervention. Results also showed improvements in tracing precision on the HAT system over time. Details of the results and lessons learned from the study are discussed.