Preliminary testing by adults of a haptics-assisted robot platform designed for children with physical impairments to access play.

Development of children's cognitive and perceptual skills depends heavily on object exploration and experience in their physical world. For children who have severe physical impairments, one of the biggest concerns is the loss of opportunities for meaningful play with objects, including physical contact and manipulation. Assistive robots can enable children to perform object manipulation through the control of simple interfaces. Touch sensations conveyed through haptic interfaces in the form of force reflection or force assistance can help a child to sense the environment and to control a robot. A robotic system with forbidden region virtual fixtures (VFs) was tested in an object sorting task. Three sorting tasks-by color, by shape, and by both color and shape-were performed by 10 adults without disability and one adult with cerebral palsy. Tasks performed with VFs were accomplished faster than tasks performed without VFs, and deviations of the motion area were smaller with VFs than without VFs. For the participant with physical impairments, two out of three tasks were slower with the VFs. This implies that forbidden region VFs are not always able to improve user task performance. Alignment with an individual's unique motion characteristics can improve VF assistance.

Usability testing of a developed assistive robotic system with virtual assistance for individuals with cerebral palsy: a case study.

This paper presents a novel application of an assistive robotic system with virtual assistance to enhance manual performance of individuals with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy affects one's voluntary motor movements resulting in limited opportunities to actively engage in physical manipulative activities that require fine motor movements and coordination. Lack of object manipulation and environmental exploration can result in further impairments such as cognitive and social delays. The proposed assistive robotic system has been developed to enhance hand movements of people with disabilities when performing a functional task colouring. This paper presents the usability testing of the effectiveness of the developed system with an individual with cerebral palsy in a set of colouring tasks. Assisted and unassisted approaches were compared and analysed through quantitative and qualitative measures. The robotic-based approach was further compared with the participant's typical alternate access method to perform the same proposed tasks. The robotic system with virtual assistance was clinically validated to be significantly more effective, compared to both unassisted and typical approaches, by increasing the hand controllability, reducing the physical load and increasing the easiness of maintaining movements within the lines. Future studies will inform the use of the system for children with disabilities to provide them with assisted play for functional and playful activities. Implications for rehabilitation Robotic system can enhance manual performance in individuals with disabilities. Participating in a robot-mediated play activity could increase children's motivation and engagement. The developed robotic system can contribute to a basis for clinical and home-based implementation of the technology to promote manual play activities for children with disabilities.