Exploring the Potential of Modifying Visual Stimuli in Virtual Reality to Reduce Hand Tremor in Micromanipulation Tasks

• Published in: Current optics and photonics 2017, 1(6), , pp.642-648
• Main Authors: John Prada, Taiwoo Park, Sunjin Jang, Jintaek Im, Cheol Song
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 물리학
• ISSN: 2508-7266; 2508-7274
• DOI: 10.3807/COPP.2017.1.6.642

Involuntary hand tremor has been a serious challenge in micromanipulation tasks and thus draws asignificant amount of attention from related fields. To minimize the effect of the hand tremor, a varietyof mechanically assistive solutions have been proposed. However, approaches increasing human awarenessof their own hand tremor have not been extensively studied. In this paper, a head mount display basedvirtual reality (VR) system to increase human self-awareness of hand tremor is proposed. It shows a usera virtual image of a handheld device with emphasized hand tremor information. Provided with thisemphasized tremor information, we hypothesize that subjects will control their hand tremor more effectively. Two methods of emphasizing hand tremor information are demonstrated: (1) direct amplification of tremorand (2) magnification of virtual object, in comparison to the controlled condition without emphasized tremorinformation. A human-subject study with twelve trials was conducted, with four healthy participants whoperformed a task of holding a handheld gripper device in a specific direction. The results showed thatthe proposed methods achieved a reduced level of hand tremor compared with the control condition. KCI Citation Count: 1