IEEE Citation:
Introduction
Free hand interaction, a part of human computer interaction
(HCI) is a cutting-edge technology has been used for several applications
including games, immersive 3D modeling, mobile augmented reality applications,
air painting, writing and sketching etc. This paper use it with assistive
technology to serve stroke patients. Using the suggested gaming application,
the researcher has tried to explore on how leap motion sensor can be used with
assistive technology in order to implement a gaming application for the
rehabilitation of upper limb (also known as upper extremity) of stroke
patients.
Contribution and Novelty
This research has using Free hand interaction which is one
of the emerging research interests in HCI paradigm. It uses leap motion a new
depth sensing device introduced lately for their application. Their
contribution was to adopt a computer game called “fruit ninja” as a stroke
rehabilitation application focusing the rehabilitation motor skills of finger
movements of stroke patients. Their aim was to evaluate the applicability of
such application for stroke rehabilitation. They proposed a kinematic model of
the hand. This model allowed them to incorporate 3D parameters of the hand in
tracking and made tracking more robust
How does it relates into my work?
One of the patient communities who may benefit largely from
hand interaction are individuals with stroke. Previously, most researcher
targeted on stroke hand rehabilitation used some wearable or robotic tools. The
current trend moves to use free hand interaction for stroke rehabilitation as
it has many advantages in patient’s point of view as well as technology.
The researcher has reviewed some literatures which made
several attempts to enhance stroke rehabilitation with HCI technologies. They
are
- Interactive glove to foster acceptance of partners after one of them is affected by stroke and help them reunite.
- A table top game built using windows surface hand input. The study involved exercises such as curling and uncurling fingers as well as a wrist flexion and extension of the hand back and forth about the wrist
- Point Assist: a mouse interface that adapts to a user's level of impairment in reaching and clicking.
- Hand Tutor: a glove-based treatment system which provides intensive flexion and extension movement of finger(s) and the wrist.
- Music Glove: finger movements by pressing fingers against each other to play GuitarHero.
These literature focus on mainly finger and writs
rehabilitation. An advancement of hand rehabilitation. Since it’s necessary to
have a wide knowledge on the topic, these literature needs to be reviewed well.
Author says that these literature are example of touch, mouse, glove-based
technologies that have been applied to stroke rehabilitation and using
free-hand interaction as the most intuitive option to stroke rehabilitation has
to be investigated.
The researcher has combined fruit ninja game with leap
sensor for Finger Individuation. They have open source java version of fruit
ninja game on top of the leap motion sdk where hand monitoring API resides in
between. They have not mentioned further implementation details but they
mentioned that they have used a model called “inverse kinematics” when recognizing hand using leap motion.
They have also pointed out the reason of using gamified
tasks for rehabilitation and the advantages of them. For a stroke patient, it
is quite difficult to play a typical computer game as well as a normal player.
So some modifications need to be done. In here, the difficulty has been reduced
removing the bombs of the fruit ninja game and a time limit was introduced in
order to give a fair gaming condition which helps for a fair evaluation.
Since evaluation procedure of a research is very important while
conducting a research, it necessary to have an idea on how the evaluation needs
to be done at the end of a research. The evaluation of this research gives some
information and advice points to do a good evaluation.
This study used only 14 stroke patients including both male
and female aged 35-71. They have different stroke levels and they are
calculated using Fugl-Meyer score and Box and Blocks Test score which are
famous methods of estimating disability levels of stroke patients. Sot it it’s
better to adopt these setting in to my research as well.
Before conducting the research, they have provided an
informed consent and the patients were briefed on how to play the game. Then
the subjects had a warm-up play which is not considered as a experiment trial.
One subject played three times and the patient had an interval between the
experiments. Then the researcher’s had given a Likert questions on a scale of
1-4 to learn about the patients' overall satisfaction. The evaluation is being done using both test
results and the answers of the questionnaire.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages
- Uses latest technology: Free hand interaction and leap motion
- Robustness
- A simple hardware used: easy to set up even in a home environment.
Disadvantages
- Tracking issue: Some of the patients found out that they had difficulty individuating their index finger to make a pointing gesture. The reason is that Leap sensor assigns temporary ID’s (1-5) to different fingers.
Suggested Future work
To solve the tracking issue: To solve this problem, we
propose a 3D model of the hand that includes specific ID’s for each finger and
contains all skeletal parameters of the hand.
Refer the paper from ACM Digital Library: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2581203
Download Paper: http://mkhademi.wix.com/maryamkhademi#!publications/c1cpo
