Quantifying Motor Skills in Early-Stage Parkinson's Disease Using Human Controller Modeling

This paper investigates the potential of using a manual pursuit tracking task for quantifying loss of motor skills due to Parkinson's disease (PD), by applying human controller (HC) modeling techniques. With this approach, it is possible to obtain detailed quantitative data on motor performance in terms of control gain, response delay,...

Determining and Controlling External Power Output During Regular Handrim Wheelchair Propulsion

The use of a manual wheelchair is critical to 1% of the world's population. Human powered wheeled mobility research has considerably matured, which has led to improved research techniques becoming available over the last decades. To increase the understanding of wheeled mobility performance, monitoring, training, skill acquisition, and...

Learning sequential force interaction skills

Learning skills from kinesthetic demonstrations is a promising way of minimizing the gap between human manipulation abilities and those of robots. We propose an approach to learn sequential force interaction skills from such demonstrations. The demonstrations are decomposed into a set of movement primitives by inferring the underlying...

Reinforcement learning of motor skills using Policy Search and human corrective advice

Robot learning problems are limited by physical constraints, which make learning successful policies for complex motor skills on real systems unfeasible. Some reinforcement learning methods, like Policy Search, offer stable convergence toward locally optimal solutions, whereas interactive machine learning or learning-from-demonstration methods...

EEG correlates of motor skill learning: an independent component approach

Motor learning is a vital ability of the human brain in which multiple cortical areas like the primary motor cortex are involved. One way to investigate the fast motor learning brain dynamics is with use of electroencephalography (EEG). This non-invasive and mobile technique records continuous electrical activity on the brain cortex with a high...

Haptic feedback during training decreases performance in telemanipulation

Teleoperation allow us to manipulate environments that cannot be manipulated directly by a human operator, like space and deep sea, but they are also used in surgery to scale movements and filter out unwanted movements. Commercial teleoperators often lack haptic feedback to the user. Literature shows that a lack of haptic feedback can reduce...

A novel protocol for motor skill learning experiments combining system identification and event-related desynchronization

Motor skill learning is the change in the capability to perform smooth and accurate movements, for example, complicated actions like playing sports or driving a car have to be learned through practice. Defective motor skills resulting from neurological diseases have severe negative effects on quality of life. Subjects have to relearn the skills...

Improving training for climbers by enhancing explorative climbing in indoor climbing gyms

Climbing indoors is growing in popularity and is even considered to be included in the Olympic games of 2020 in Japan. Despite the fact that numerous new climbing gyms are being built, there has been little innovation in the gyms themselves. For decades, climbing gyms have wooden walls with plastic holds screwed onto them, and the question...

Older age relates to worsening of fine motor skills: A population-based study of middle-aged and elderly persons

Introduction: In a population-based study of 1,912 community-dwelling persons of 45 years and older, we investigated the relation between age and fine motor skills using the Archimedes spiral-drawing test. Also, we studied the effect of brain volume on fine motor skills. Methods: Participants were required to trace a template of a spiral on an...

Magic Magnetic:Playground equipment for improving girls’ gross motor manipulative skills

Today’s 10 year olds will die at a younger age than their parents will (Sportnext, 2012). For the first time in years the life expectancy of a human has declined. During the last few decades in Europe young people’s physical performance has declined. A decrease can be identified in most of the motor abilities, and physical performances such as...

Variability in bimanual wheelchair propulsion: Consistency of two instrumented wheels during handrim wheelchair propulsion on a motor driven treadmill

Background Handrim wheelchair propulsion is a complex bimanual motor task. The bimanually applied forces on the rims determine the speed and direction of locomotion. Measurements of forces and torques on the handrim are important to study status and change of propulsion technique (and consequently mechanical strain) due to processes of learning,...

Construct validity and assessment of the learning curve for the SIMENDO endoscopic simulator