Haptic Human-Human Interaction During an Ankle Tracking Task: Effects of Virtual Connection Stiffness

In this study, our goal was to investigate whether these findings generalize to the lower limb during an ankle tracking task. Pairs of healthy participants (i.e., dyads) independently tracked target trajectories with and without connections rendered between two ankle robots. We tested the effects of connection stiffness as well as visual noise to manipulate the correlation of tracking errors between partners. In our analysis, we compared changes in task performance across conditions while tracking with and without the connection. We found that tracking improvements while connected increased with connection stiffness, favoring the worse partner in the dyad during hard connections. We modeled the interaction as three springs in series, considering the stiffness of the connection and each partners’ ankle, to show that improvements were likely due to a cancellation of random tracking errors between partners. These results suggest a simplified mechanism of improvements compared to what has been reported during upper-limb dyadic tracking.
Source: IEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research