Hand-writing Rehabilitation in the Haptic Virtual Environment

Abstract

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has been applied to many medical fields. Rehabilitation with VR technologies is one of the emerging research directions. In this paper, a rehabilitation exercise - English character handwriting training exercise is described in the haptic virtual environment. The approach can be used to guide user's hand movement on the right track of the predefined trajectory according to the real-time guidance force. A haptic device, PHANTOM Premium 1.0, is used for writing English characters as a virtual pen, and also for giving the user force feedbacks as a guidance tool. The user with hand dysfunctions can be trained for precise hand movements through this writing rehabilitation interface. The experimental results and performance analysis are also given in the paper