Experimental Verification of Grasping Information Interface Concept

In human-human communications, especially in face-to-face communication, sub-verbal and non-verbal messages have more importance than messages transported by words. On the other hand, in traditional man-machine interfaces, machines only understand pre-defined operations, and never understand operators' sub-verbal and non-verbal messages. This causes some usability problems in machine operations. We have proposed elsewhere that grasping information interface concept (GIIC) is the key idea to alleviate the above-mentioned communication gap between man and machine, and this paper verifies GIIC experimentally. GIIC regards grasping-and-moving as a fundamental hand operation necessary for performing tasks using modern man-machine interfaces, and behavioral measures associated with grasping, such as force, posture, etc., should have much potential in developing task-adaptive and operator-adaptive interfaces because it is known that how people grasp devices is dependent on the purpose of these tasks. GIIC provides machines with a communication channel to understand operators' intents more through the grasping information