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. 2008 Mar 12;3(3):e1775.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001775.

Haptic guidance improves the visuo-manual tracking of trajectories

Jérémy Bluteau  1 , Sabine Coquillart, Yohan Payan, Edouard Gentaz
Affiliations

Haptic guidance improves the visuo-manual tracking of trajectories

Jérémy Bluteau et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Background: Learning to perform new movements is usually achieved by following visual demonstrations. Haptic guidance by a force feedback device is a recent and original technology which provides additional proprioceptive cues during visuo-motor learning tasks. The effects of two types of haptic guidances-control in position (HGP) or in force (HGF)-on visuo-manual tracking ("following") of trajectories are still under debate. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPALS FINDINGS: Three training techniques of haptic guidance (HGP, HGF or control condition, NHG, without haptic guidance) were evaluated in two experiments. Movements produced by adults were assessed in terms of shapes (dynamic time warping) and kinematics criteria (number of velocity peaks and mean velocity) before and after the training sessions. Trajectories consisted of two Arabic and two Japanese-inspired letters in Experiment 1 and ellipses in Experiment 2. We observed that the use of HGF globally improves the fluency of the visuo-manual tracking of trajectories while no significant improvement was found for HGP or NHG.

Conclusion/significance: These results show that the addition of haptic information, probably encoded in force coordinates, play a crucial role on the visuo-manual tracking of new trajectories.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Schematic view of haptic guidances: (a) Haptic guidance in position (HGP); the force felt by the user at time t is proportional to displacement between the current user position and the theoretical position on the model trajectory; (b) Haptic guidance in force (HGF); the force felt by the user at time t is the same as the force existing for the theoretical trajectory at the same time.
Figure 2
Figure 2
System overview: (a) The modified stylus pen; (b) The graphic User Interface displayed to the subject; (c) A subject undergoing training on the WYSIWYF interface.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Letters proposed in experiment 1: Letters 1 and 2 are Arabic and letters 3 and 4 are “Japanese-like” letters.
Figure 4
Figure 4. All ellipses used in experiment 2: In red, the three references trajectories used before and after each training session; In green and blue, the trajectories used during the training sessions, equidistant in the choice of their diagonals (eccentricity).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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