Design of a Haptic-Gripper Virtual Reality System (Hg) for Analyzing Fine Motor Behaviors in Children with Autism

Abstract

Fine motor skills, including grasping, manipulating, and reaching for objects, are a documented weakness for many children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). However, relatively less research has attempted to address these motor deficits, especially by taking advantage of advanced technology. To explore potential mechanisms for expanding accessibility to fine motor intervention for people with ASD, we present the design and implementation of a feasibility study of a novel Haptic-Gripper Virtual Reality System (Hg). Hg is capable of providing analysis and practice opportunities of fine motor skills in an adaptive and low-cost virtual environment with real-time auditory, visual, and haptic feedback. The Haptic Gripper in Hg can detect a user's grip force and hand location and provide haptic feedback to guide hand movement and grip control while completing several simple and engaging virtual fine motor tasks. We conducted a feasibility study with six children with ASD and six typically developing (TD) children and found that participants were interested in using the Haptic Gripper and could quickly get used to the system. Although the results are preliminary and limited, we observed medium to strong correlations between the proposed fine motor skill metrics and the scores achieved with a standardized fine motor skill test and improvements of participants in accuracy and steadiness of movement and force control. This study provides important guidance for future investigations of the Hg's potential for assessing and improving fine motor manipulation skills.

A Virtual Reality Based System for the Screening and Classification of Autism

“…To date, VR has often been applied to interventions for children and adolescents on the autistic spectrum. For example, in the context of social communication, interaction and skill training [47,57,72], the training of emotion recognition, facial expression, as well as body gestures [22], phobia interventions [45,46], the practice of fine motor skills [71] and driving exercises [66], (see [9] for a recent review). In populations with neurodegenerative diseases [53] or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) [2,3], VR technologies have also been used as a tool to aid the evaluation processes to diagnose these conditions.…”

Haptic Glove with Haptic Feedback for Elastic Objects at a Low Cost

“…A number of researches of convergence of haptic technology, fine motor, or EMG sensor have come out such as research about the correlation between fine motor development and haptic technology, fine motor rehabilitation using haptic technology, fine motor rehabilitation treatment using EMG sensors, and rehabilitation treatment using LMC. To be more specific, there was a haptic cognitive training study on the developmental coordination disorder (Wuang et al, 2022), a patent for a hand rehabilitation system based on hand motion recognition (Kim, 2015), a multi-finger control study for patients with cerebral palsy (Park and Xu, 2017), and a haptic-gripper study for analysis of fine motor behavior in autistic children (Zhao et al, 2018). From this background, we designed the demo content where a haptic glove and an EMG sensor can be utilized together for fine motor development and rehabilitation.…”

A study of children emotion and their performance while handwriting Arabic characters using a haptic device

“…Some studies focused mainly on features such as pen pressures as indicators of enjoyment and frustration (Anagnostopoulou et al, 2021); gaze direction (Khan, 2020), facial expression (Young-Seok Kim et al, 2013), pose estimation (Guneysu Ozgur et al, 2020) and many other techniques (Ashwin & Guddeti, 2020;Dewan et al, 2019). However, few research works have been carried out on how children with low handwriting skills react to different virtual reality environment (VR) writing tasks (Baltrusaitis et al, 2016;Savov et al, 2018;Zhao et al, 2018).…”