by Mark Ollig
Last week, I watched video about the Georgia Institute
of Technology glove which is able to teach skill sets to people.
Individuals obtained a needed dexterity skill, via
sensory vibrations, while wearing a special computer-controlled glove.
The method used was based on a combination of passive
haptic learning; which is a technique of teaching one to learn via
muscle-vibration memory, along with sounds, and visual stimuli.
Think of how you are able to type without looking down
at the keyboard. This is because of all the time you spent having the muscle in
your fingers learn where the correct keys you want to type are located on the
keyboard.
Yours truly learned to type in Mr. Harold Knoll’s
typing class back in the day when we used manual and electric typewriters.
I admit, I am no longer as agile and fast as I once
was, but my typing fingers can still dance fairly quickly over the QWERTY
keyboard.
What the researchers at the Georgia Institute of
Technology created was a user “tactile interface.” Namely, a glove with special
tactors utilizing a tiny vibration motor on each finger.
The glove in the video is shown on a user’s left hand,
with the vibrating motors sewn inside the glove above each knuckle.
The glove
is connected to a small circuit board via a ribbon cable. A connector on the
circuit board is plugged into a laptop USB port.
When learning to type the Braille system, a computing
program controls which of the fingers is to receive a vibration, or stimuli.
The tiny motors vibrate, causing stimulation of the finger corresponding with
the specific pattern of a pre-determined phrase in Braille.
There were also
audio prompts for notifying the individual of the Braille letters being used.
“Remarkably, we found that people could transfer
knowledge learned from typing Braille, to reading Braille,” said Ph. D. student
Caitlyn E. Seim, of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Back in 2012, students and professors at the Georgia
Institute of Technology developed a vibrating, re-enforcing learning technology
for using a computer-connected glove to teach a person how to play a piano.
It was a fingerless glove, called the mobile music
touch (MMT), and when worn, teaches the fingers of the wearer how to play a
piano melody.
This MMT glove employs vibrations inside the glove allowing it to
tap each finger in the proper sequence needed to play the notes of a particular
song.
In a video I watched, I saw a person who had no prior
experience in playing a piano, have his hand become conditioned with the proper
muscle memory for playing a simple song.
After 30 minutes, the person took the
glove off, and was able to play the song on the piano.
The process involves having the participant hear the
actual song they will be learning played all the way through on a piano. The
correct piano key lights up as each note is heard.
While the learner is wearing
the glove, they feel the individual notes vibrate on their fingers, while
seeing the keys on the piano light up as the song plays.
What’s occurring is a vibration inside the glove is
tapping the correct finger to be used to play the exact note needed as the song
progresses.
The song is learned in parts; not all at one time.
As one part of
the song is audibly played, the user feels the vibration in their fingers; they
also see the notes played on the piano by observing the lights of each key.
The person then attempts to recreate what they learned
by pressing the piano keys they felt were being played as the muscles in their
fingers learned the song.
One researcher said what surprised them most, based
from their study, was the difference in sensation people got back after using
the glove, compared to before using it.
Some folks reported being able to pick
up very small objects they were previously unable to pick up before using the
glove.
The muscle conditioning benefits from the MMT glove can
also be used in other skill sets, such as improving typing skills, as one story
explained.
A quadriplegic partook in an eight-week study using the
glove for about two hours a day. This person was able to improve dexterity in
their typing skills from using one finger to type, to using two fingers on one
hand.
On this video, the study participant smiled and
quipped, saying, “This allowed me to regain some dexterity; but also learn how
to play the piano.”
“Passive Haptic Learning of Typing Skills Facilitated
by Wearable Computers” is a detailed, six-page document recently written by
Seim and two others at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The document can be
read at http://tinyurl.com/bytes-glove.
Their research is improving people’s ability to acquire
skill sets using passive haptic learning, by wearing a tactile-responsive,
computer-interfaced glove.
Screen-capture from:
Georgia Tech YouTube channel