CREATION OF VIRTUAL OBJECTS TO BE USED WITH HAPTIC DEVICE FOR MOTOR REHABILITATION

Abstract

Haptic technology, or haptics, refers to a technology which interfaces the user via the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations and/or motions to the user. Due to its characteristic of force feedback, it can be used in rehabilitation of motor disordered subjects. Computerized and Virtual Environment (VE) training systems for persons with disabilities, many of which utilize the haptic feedback, have gained increasing acceptance in the recent years. To get rehabilitated, they were using occupational therapy in previous years. But it needs continuous presence of therapist during training and it is costly and time consuming process. Few years before haptic technology was too costly to afford so, it was not compatible member in training process. But now-a-day haptic devices are evolving and getting cheaper, more flexible, and more compact in size. It makes them stronger for occupational therapy. So, the objective of this work is to create VE which can augment their motor skill. The system is designed in such a way that it can be used for both, disordered subject as well as normal children. It comprise of alphabet letters, numbers, words, mazes and games. The • system was designed after getting acquainted with problems faced by motor disordered subjects. After deciding the environment, algorithm for each one was prepared. And application file (*.exe) was created in Visual C++ 2008 using OPENHAPTIC TOOLKIT codes along with OpenGL Utility toolkit (GLUT) and C language. Then graphic user interface (GUI) for access all this application was created. The next step was to check out its effectiveness in motor rehabilitation. So, experiments on different subjects were conducted to find system's reliability. The result shows that after practicing on this system one can build up and augment the motor skill. The time taken by subjects were reduced considerably after they got training on developed system. It shows that the speed of performing the tasks, which require motor skill, improve considerably and augmentation of motor skill could be done by using presented system. Inclusion of more exercise will make this system more diversify and the capability of improving motor skill will be increased. Further improvement in system will make it more powerful to provide practice at relatively low cost.