We explored the potential for a portable gait retraining system, which provides real-time haptic feedback to a user who is occupied with other tasks. We conducted a study to compars the effects of attention and haptic feedback on learning and retention of a new gait to understand whether humans can learn a new gait when distracted and if real-time haptic feedback can enhance the process. We find that subjects are able to approximately learn the new gait under all conditions, but subjects had better learning and retention with full attention on the training and with haptic feedback on every step.
Our results support the idea that a portable real-time haptic feedback system has promise for facilitating motion training.
Course Paper