Vibrotactile feedback and visual cues for arm posture replication

For rehabilitation applications using multiple types of feedback can help speed up posture correction of the subject - visual cues are particularly helpful in providing global information to the subjects. This paper presents a system that aids students to mimic a master´s arm posture using vibrotactile feedback and visual cues. The design of the vibrotactile feedback unit as well as the posture correction protocol are discussed in details. Experiments comparing student´s posture correction time using only vibrotactile feedback and vibrotactile feedback with visual cue are conducted to show the difference in using multi-modal feedback over unimodal feedback systems. An improved design of vibration pattern for better user perception and interpretation of the vibrotactile feedback information is also presented at the end of the paper.