A case study on the effects of a haptic interface on human arm movements with implications for rehabilitation robotics

Abstract

Many different studies have proposed models for human arm trajectories, almost all of them agreed on invariant feature of these movements, such as smooth trajectories with straight line and uni-modal velocity profiles. We observed these characteristics in contact with a haptic interface that might modify the movement features. Significantly, our result showed similar characteristics for the human reaching and returning movement for one subject. We also used the data in comparison with the model based on the minimum jerk theory. The results obtained from our experiments are consistent with the model based on this theory, which suggests that our virtual trajectory is a good model of human arm movements. Further investigation, with more number of subjects are needed to prove these consistencies.