Haptic hand-tremor simulation for enhancing empathy with disabled users

This paper presents a system designed to induce, in healthy subjects, artificial hand-tremor that is observed in persons affected by neurological impairments. The objective is to allow a healthy user to feel in first person the effect of the impairment while performing common manipulative tasks in order for her/him to understand and gain empathy with the impaired person. The developed tool is based on a wrist-attached desktop haptic interface with a workspace that is comparable to that of the arm of the user. Such device is able to exert controlled forces on the user´s wrist and induce hand-tremor whose frequency and amplitude is correlated with different pathologies. The control of the device is based on the recording and playback of tremor signals acquired by a motion tracker. In this paper, we present the system with its dynamic characteristics and three different types of controller are experimentally tested and compared.