-- LiJiang? - 06 Dec 2007

The portable low-cost haptic device

As discussed in the previous section. Usually the sensory reduction on the upper extremities is not symmetric for multiple sclerosis patients. Many of them have the sensation on one of their hand lost or reduced, while they still have normal sensation on the other hand. there is a tendency to reduce the utilization of that impaired hand and shift tasks to the opposite hand.

A portable low-cost haptic device was designed to help the patients to "feel" the contact force between the impaired hand and the object during manipulation.

The portable haptic rehabilitation apparatus consists of five parts: force sensors, signal conditioning circuits, microcontroller, amplification circuits and vibrotactile stimulators.

The DAQ and Computer in the above diagram are added to gather data for the experiment. They are not part of the portable low-cost haptic device.