This research project focuses on delivering haptic guidance through cutaneous (skin stretch and squeeze) methods to help train people for new tasks. Haptic devices are tremendously useful for giving customized feedback during training. These devices can simulate forces associated with real-world tasks or provide guidance forces that help users to complete the task more effectively or accurately. It has been shown, however, that providing both task forces and guidance forces simultaneously through the same haptic interface can lead to confusion and worse performance. This research project focuses on implementing guidance and training forces through the CUFF (Clenching Upper-Limb Force Feedback device), an actuated upper-arm band that uses cutaneous skin stretch feedback, and relaying task forces through the OpenWrist, a forearm-located kinesthetic haptic interface.

We first explored different methods of delivering cutaneous guidance to subjects in a dynamic trajectory following task, then compared cutaneous guidance to kinesthetic guidance, a traditional form of spatially separated assistance. In a new experiment, we compare training a learnable task using cutaneous guidance compared to solely practicing using task forces.

Publications

E. Pezent, Fani, S., Clark, J., Bianchi, M., and OMalley, M. K., “Spatially Separating Haptic Guidance from Task Dynamics through Wearable Devices.”, IEEE Trans Haptics, 2019.