TIKL: Development of a Wearable Vibrotactile Feedback Suit for Improved Human Motor Learning

[Summary]

The goal of this paper is to create a vibrotactile feedback suit that teach people to learn motions. Based on this idea, they build a system called TIKL (Tactile Interaction for Kinesthetic Learning). With this suit, the learner can learn using multiple channels because it can give tactile feedback on every joint simultaneously. In constrast, a traditional teacher can only teach the people by correcting each joint one by one. Such a system can be used in sports training, motor rehabilitation, dance, postural retraining for health, etc. The feedback system consists of four main modules: users, vicon motion capture system, control software and motor-system feedback.

They tested it with a simple motion: holding a fixed position with their right arm. 40 people were tested on this motion, among which only 20 of them provided with the additional vibration feedback. Their results using a 5-DOF robotic suit show a 27% improvement in accuracy while performing the target motion, and an accelerated learning rate of up to 23%.

[Discussion]

I like the idea of this paper. It would be particularly useful for training motions for a group of people. However, I have a few concerns on this paper. First, the experiment they included in the paper was very simple, and it is hard to imagine how the system would help to improve learning for a more complex dynamic gesture. Second, different people have different skeleton sizes, so how to retarget the teacher's reference motion to fit learners' skeleton. This retargeting is needed because, for different users, the same joint values won't guarantee the motions look like the same or generate the same effect.