Good vibrations: Guiding body movements with vibrotactile feedback

We describe the ongoing development of a system to support the teaching of good posture and bowing technique to novice violin players. Using an inertial motion capture system we can track in real-time a player’s bowing action and how it deviates from a target trajectory set by their music teacher. The system provides real-time vibrotactile feedback on the correctness of the student’s posture and bowing action. We present the findings of an initial study that shows that vibrotactile feedback can guide arm movements in one and two dimension pointing tasks. The advantages of vibrotactile feedback for teaching basic bowing technique to novice violin players are that it does not place demands on the students’ visual and auditory systems which are already heavily involved in the activity of music making, and is understood with little training

Towards a real-time system for teaching novices good violin bowing technique

We describe the ongoing development of a system to support the teaching of good posture and bowing technique to novice violin players. Using an inertial motion capture system we can track in real-time: i) a player’s bowing action (and measure how it deviates from a target trajectory); ii) whether the player is holding their violin correctly. We detail some initial experiments that show that vibrotactile feedback can guide arm movements in one and two dimensions. We then present some preliminary findings from integrating the motion capture and feedback components into a prototype real-time training system. The advantages of vibrotactile feedback are that: i) it does not use the students’ visual and auditory systems which are already involved in the activity of music making; ii) it is an intuitive way to guide body movements

Technology inspired design for pervasive healthcare

Pervasive healthcare technologies are increasingly using novel sensory devices that are able to measure phenomena that could not be measured before. To develop novel healthcare applications that use these largely untested technologies, it is important to have a design process that allows proper exploration of the capabilities of the novel technologies. We focus on the technology-inspired design process that was used in the development of a system to support posture and provide guidance by nudging people, and how this has lead us to explore pervasive healthcare applications

Acoustic noise radiated by PWM-controlled induction machine drives

This paper investigates the acoustic noise radiated from two nominally identical induction motors when fed from sinusoidal, and asymmetric regular sampling subharmonic and space-vector pulsewidth modulation (PWM) converters. The theory for analyzing the noise spectrum is developed further to account for the interaction between the motor and the drive. It is shown that manufacturing tolerances can result in significant differences in the noise level emitted from nominally identical motors, and that mechanical resonances can result in extremely high noise emissions. Such resonances can be induced by stator and rotor slot air-gap field harmonics due to the fundamental component of current, and by the interaction between the airgap field harmonics produced by the fundamental and the PWM harmonic currents. The significance of the effect of PWM strategy on the noise is closely related to the mechanical resonance with vibration mode order zero, while the PWM strategy will be critical only if the dominant cause of the emitted noise is the interaction of the fundamental air-gap field and PWM harmonic

Low-cost Sensor Glove with Force Feedback for Learning from Demonstrations using Probabilistic Trajectory Representations

Sensor gloves are popular input devices for a large variety of applications including health monitoring, control of music instruments, learning sign language, dexterous computer interfaces, and tele-operating robot hands. Many commercial products as well as low-cost open source projects have been developed. We discuss here how low-cost (approx. 250 EUROs) sensor gloves with force feedback can be build, provide an open source software interface for Matlab and present first results in learning object manipulation skills through imitation learning on the humanoid robot iCub.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Workshop paper of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2015