Haptic characteristics of some activities of daily living

Activities of daily living (ADLs) are of interest in rehabilitation, independent living for the elderly and infirm, and to the designers of everyday objects. This paper reports measurements of forces and torques at the interaction point between users and some everyday objects in ADLs. We report force and torque recordings of several writing tasks with pen and pencil, opening and closing a jar, and dialing and texting with a cell phone. Besides average measurements, we measured some statistically significant differences between some very similar activities. For example, RMS forces in writing tasks were lower with pencil than ball-point pen, dialing a number showed lower forces than texting, and texting forces differed between ¿ABC¿ and ¿T9¿ texting methods.