Haptic hand-tremor simulation for enhancing empathy with disabled users

Abstract

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 wristattached 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.

Designing Fashion Technology Garments for Awareness

“…Empathy tools are digital or material designs that aim to place the user in the context of another's lived or felt experience. Product designers and caregivers first used empathy tools to understand the challenges faced by their users [1,5,10,15,17,35,40,41] and people under their care [2,4,16,22,34,37,43]. While empathy tools were initially designed with these instrumental goals in mind, the term is now used to describe tools that broadly aim to create awareness for others' lived experiences and encourage prosocial behaviours.…”