Mobile Music Touch: Vibration stimulus in hand rehabilitation

摘要

Hand rehabilitation often consists of repetitive exercises, which may result in reduced patient compliance and decreased results. The Mobile Music Touch (MMT) is proposed as an engaging form of hand rehabilitation. MMT is a lightweight, wireless haptic music instruction system consisting of gloves and a mobile Bluetooth-enabled computing device, such as a mobile phone. Musical passages to be learned via “passive haptic learning” are loaded into the mobile device and played repeatedly while the user performs other tasks. As each note of the music plays, vibrators on each finger in the gloves activate, indicating which finger to use to play each note. We present observations from a pilot study of MMT used for hand rehabilitation for people with tetraplegia resulting from incomplete Spinal Cord Injury (SCI); observations from a study conducted on able-bodied people, providing baseline data for assessment methods; and observations on glove design for persons with tetraplegia.