Haptic Devices as Objective Measures for Motor Skill

We have developed engaging virtual environments using haptic technology for the purpose of both understanding functional activity and restoring functionality to disabled individuals. To assess our virtual environments, we used 21 able-bodied subjects and examined their motor performance by comparing several metrics captured by the simulations to the completion time. We discovered that individuals were highly engaged during our simulation, and the motor performance across subjects improved with each repeated trial. We showed how to use motor performance metrics that can be captured by the device can accurately predict completion time. We also developed several metrics for estimating object interaction difficulty.