A robot-aided rehabilitation system has been expected as one of promising advanced technologies to provide sufficient treatments to patients in order to solve the shortage of therapists. Therefore, many of advanced rehabilitation systems have been developed by means of the robotic technology so far. Since the motivation of a patient for training is the very important factor in regaining his/her damaged functions, a game-like motor task using the virtual reality (VR) technology is usually prepared in such advanced rehabilitation systems. Some recent researches reported that cooperative and competitive motor training tasks are more beneficial to the improvement and maintenance of patient's motivation. However, the research on the cooperative/competitive training system using robotic devices has been still in the developing stage. The present paper develops a ball manipulation task using Unity, in which a pair of two operators moves two handles of the manipulandum system on the horizontal plane while controls the rotational motion of a board in the 3D VR space on the computer display so that a ball will pass 16 points on the board within one minute. Since it is unknown how the handles motion by a pair on the horizontal plane should be transformed into the rotational motion of the board on the VR space, the different six operation patterns are designed. Experiments were carried out for five pairs by six participants according to the operation patterns. A set of experimental results demonstrated that the motions of handles and ball were varied in the pairs while the subjective evaluation of the operation patterns can be predicted by the simple index relative to the ball motion in the VR space.
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