上肢義手における触覚知覚：機械的特性評価、人間実験、計算的知見
Tactile Perception in Upper Limb Prostheses: Mechanical Characterization, Human Experiments, and Computational Findings
4種類の義手で振動触覚による指の識別能力を調べ、単純で硬い義手ほど接触指の識別精度が高いことを示した。
著者: Alessia Silvia Ivani, Manuel G. Catalano, Giorgio Grioli, Matteo Bianchi, Yon Visell, Antonio Bicchi
分類: cs.RO, cs.HC
原文アブストラクト
Our research investigates vibrotactile perception in four prosthetic hands with distinct kinematics and mechanical characteristics. We found that rigid and simple socket-based prosthetic devices can transmit tactile information and surprisingly enable users to identify the stimulated finger with high reliability. This ability decreases with more advanced prosthetic hands with additional articulations and softer mechanics. We conducted experiments to understand the underlying mechanisms. We assessed a prosthetic user's ability to discriminate finger contacts based on vibrations transmitted through the four prosthetic hands. We also performed numerical and mechanical vibration tests on the prostheses and used a machine learning classifier to identify the contacted finger. Our results show that simpler and rigid prosthetic hands facilitate contact discrimination (for instance, a user of a purely cosmetic hand can distinguish a contact on the index finger from other fingers with 83% accuracy), but all tested hands, including soft advanced ones, performed above chance level. Despite advanced hands reducing vibration transmission, a machine learning algorithm still exceeded human performance in discriminating finger contacts. These findings suggest the potential for enhancing vibrotactile feedback in advanced prosthetic hands and lay the groundwork for future integration of such feedback in prosthetic devices.
