Article

Sensory feedback and the required attentional demands are important aspects in
prosthesis acceptance. In this study, hand-opening feedback is provided and the
performance in a virtual grasping task is investigated. Simultaneously, a
secondary task was performed to investigate the attentional demands. Ten
nondisabled subjects performed the tasks with and without feedback about the hand
opening through an array of eight vibrotactile stimulators on the forearm.
Activation of one stimulator corresponded to one hand-opening position. For the
dual-task experiments, subjects simultaneously performed a secondary auditory
counting task. The addition of vibrotactile feedback increased the performance
(expressed in percentages of correct hand positions, mean absolute errors in
position, and percentages of deviations up to one hand-opening position), but the
duration of the tasks was also increased. Three levels of distraction (no
distraction, counting task, count and subtract task) were applied, which did not
influence the performance in the grasping tasks except for the highest level of
distraction. We concluded that the proposed method to provide hand-opening
feedback through an array of eight vibrotactile stimulators is successful because
the performance in a grasping task increases but it is not significantly
attention demanding.

Langue : ANGLAIS