Haptic Attributes and Human Motor Skills

Most human fine motor skills involve the use of a tool to complete the given task. The task to be completed is often defined in terms of some desired trajectory and humans generate certain forces to achieve the desired trajectory. In this paper we describe our efforts to experimentally and theoretically classify forces associated with these skilled tasks. The idea is then to develop a system that can capture and playback exhibition of skill through haptics from person to person. Our preliminary results from experiments show that the forces generated by an individual are unique for a given task. Furthermore, for a given person, these forces show little variance over repeated exhibition of the same task. A virtual writing simulator was used to collect data from human subjects. The significance of this research is that not only was the forces generated by a person for a given skill unique, but is also verifiably different from another human subject performing the same task.