Utility and Usability of Two Forms of Supplemental Vibrotactile Kinesthetic Feedback for Enhancing Movement Accuracy and Efficiency in Goal-Directed Reaching

Recent advances in wearable sensors and computing have made possible the development of novel sensory augmentation technologies that promise to enhance human motor performance and quality of life in a wide range of applications. We compared the objective utility and subjective user experience for two biologically inspired ways to encode movement-related information into supplemental feedback for the real-time control of goal-directed reaching in healthy, neurologically intact adults. One encoding scheme mimicked visual feedback encoding by converting real-time hand position in a Cartesian frame of reference into supplemental kinesthetic feedback provided by a vibrotactile display attached to the non-moving arm and hand. The other approach mimicked proprioceptive encoding by providing real-time arm joint angle information via the vibrotactile display. We found that both encoding schemes had objective utility in that after a brief training period, both forms of supplemental feedback promoted improved reach accuracy in the absence of concurrent visual feedback over performance levels achieved using proprioception alone. Cartesian encoding promoted greater reductions in target capture errors in the absence of visual feedback (Cartesian: 59% improvement; Joint Angle: 21% improvement). Accuracy gains promoted by both encoding schemes came at a cost in terms of temporal efficiency; target capture times were considerably longer (1.5 s longer) when reaching with supplemental kinesthetic feedback than without. Furthermore, neither encoding scheme yielded movements that were particularly smooth, although movements made with joint angle encoding were smoother than movements with Cartesian encoding. Participant responses on user experience surveys indicate that both encoding schemes were motivating and that both yielded passable user satisfaction scores. However, only Cartesian endpoint encoding was found to have passable usability; participants felt more competent using Cartesian encoding than joint angle encoding. These results are expected to inform future efforts to develop wearable technology to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of goal-directed actions using continuous supplemental kinesthetic feedback.