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Robotics and Autonomous Systems Lab
at Vanderbilt

A Haptic Virtual System for Improving Fine Motor Skills in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Personnel: Huan Zhao

Goals/Objectives:

Fine motor skills, including gripping, holding and reaching, are useful and necessary in fundamental daily activities. However, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficits and delays in fine motor skills compared to their peers. Thus we propose a virtual training system enabling the assessment and improvement of fine motor skills for children with ASD through haptic interaction in a low-cost and engaging virtual environment with real-time feedback (e.g., haptic, auditory and visual feedback).

The pictures in the first row show the corresponding relative positions between the balls as the user separately applies small (left), medium (middle) and large (right) finger pressure on the press plates of the Haptic Gripper using thumb and index finger.

Outline:

The haptic virtual system consists of a Haptic Gripper allowing users to manipulate (e.g., grip and move) virtual objects in the games and thus provides opportunities for users to improve finger and hand motor control. The Haptic Gripper can detect the spatial position of the user’s hand and finger pressure as well as apply haptic feedback on the user’s hand. The haptic feedback combined with visual and audio feedback provides real-time guidance that helps the user to make appropriate manipulation adjustments in time.

We have developed a series of virtual games for one user as well as for two users to play together. These games were designed in such a way that the user needs to apply appropriate finger pressure to adjust the inner-distance/rotation of virtual objects and simultaneously move these objects toward targets.

Letter Tasks simulate handwriting tasks by using the Haptic Gripper as the pen. The user is expected to apply appropriate grip force to draw lines with appropriate sizes.

Publications:

  • H. Zhao, A. Swanson, A. Weitlauf, Z. Warren, and N. Sarkar, “Design of a Haptic Virtual System for Improving Fine Motor Skills in Children with Autism,” accepted by the 8th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2017) and the Affiliated Conferences.
Path Tasks require the user to move two balls along various specific paths trying not to hit the walls by maintain appropriate distance between two balls.
In the collaborative task, two players collaboratively move and rotate a convey board to drop balls into correct buckets.