at USC's Integrated Media Systems Center:
A National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center
Interdisciplinary Study of Neuroplasticity and Stroke Rehabilitation
The primary goal of this project is to develop VEs that include different levels of haptic sensory feedback and to evaluate the effectiveness of these applications for post stroke rehabilitation. The tasks to be performed within these VEs will span a range of activities from everyday functional tasks to game-like activities designed to motivate specific motor action that is believed to underlie more functional behavior. The outcome of this work will be to create VE applications that will be evaluated for the usability of the VE interface and display devices by patient populations following stroke.
Tele-rehabilitation
Our goal is to design a flexible platform that allows application builders to rapidly design, create and deploy applications that require the transmission of delay-sensitive media streams such as audio, video, and haptic data. As an initial example we will apply our framework to tele-rehabilitation where a therapist remotely monitors the exercise regimen and progress of a people post-stroke.
Mutual Touch Over the Net
Based on a distributed
architecture for real-time collection and broadcast of haptic information
to multiple participants, heterogeneous haptic devices (the PHANToM and
the CyberGrasp) were used in an experiment to test the performance accuracy
and sense of presence of participants engaged in a task involving mutual
touch. In the experiment, the hands of CyberGrasp users were modeled for
the computer to which the PHANToM was connected. PHANToM users were requested
to touch the virtual hands of CyberGrasp users to transmit randomly ordered
letters of the alphabet using a pre-set coding system.
Multimodal User-State Sensing in Learner-Centric Surgical Simulators
This project is to develop and evaluate a new genre of surgical simulators that will quickly, efficiently, and accurately capture and convey expertise in standard and new surgical skills. The simulators will create a unique surgical learning experience in which time is not restricted and the learner can be allowed to explore and make mistakes.
Haptic Display of Museum Objects
The goal of this project
to make 3D art accessible through virtual museums by allowing remote visitors
the ability to circumnavigate objects and to experience them through tactile
sense. Current efforts use haptics for rotation and virtual touching of
digitized museum objects and digital sculptures
Haptic Rendering of Seismic Data
We rendered a map of the shaking in various parts of the area due to specific earthquake events (e.g. Northridge) to the tip of the PHANToM. We rendered depth by giving the map more deformability in areas of greater depth (so the user can push down further). We also incorporated speech recognition into the interface to develop applications of haptics for visually impaired/blind users incorporate. Thus a user can interact with the map via spoken commands.