A rehabilitation method with visual and haptic guidance for children with upper extremity disability

Abstract

Activities of daily living present difficulties to children with upper extremity disabilities. Among the activities, handwriting is considered essential to the children, and occupational therapy is important for them to adapt to the required motor skills. In this paper, a virtual-reality based system is developed for training fine motor skills in the context of writing Chinese characters. A haptic device equipped with a pen-like stylus is employed as user interface. Haptic cues in the form of feedback forces are provided through the device to drag the child’s hand towards the correct path and direction. Real-time quantitative measurements can be recorded to allow for data analysis and performance tracking.