A real time, distributed system with haptic interfaces for fine motor skill rehabilitation and its quality of experience

Abstract

Recent inclusion of haptics in rehabilitation is expanding and this requires efficient architecture for stable and synchronized operation. In this paper, we propose a distributed architecture with multiple haptic interfaces to improve the fine motor skill disability. The preceding works with haptics for rehabilitation and motor recovery practices a stand alone infrastructure with time consuming operations for training. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed system provides three significant contributions: (i) a real time 3-phase operation to avoid invariable and time consuming practice with recorded exercises; (ii) a distributed environment to support one-to-many remote accessibility for training and practice; (iii) a novel force rendering algorithm to handle better synchronization among the haptic interfaces in the network to provide smooth force feedback in real time. The effectiveness of our system is demonstrated by the user study that also includes the evaluation from a specialist.