Speaker: Zhaoxin Yin – ECE
Date: March 2, 2011
Time and Place: 12:15pm; Hugel 103
Title: A Wearable Instrumentation System for the Study of Finger-Object Contact Timing during Prehension
Advisers: Prof Yih-Choung Yu (Dept of ECE), Prof Luis Schettino (Dept of Neuroscience)
Abstract:
Grasping behavior is perhaps the most characteristic of all human motor tasks. Although extensive research has been committed to studying the planning and development of this action, little is known about the actual timing of finger contacts during object acquisition. A simple wearable device has been developed to study the human grasping behavior. This device includes a custom-made glove as an interface to detect the finger contact signals, a simple electronic circuits to enhance the signal quality, and a real-time data acquisition system to synchronize the acquisition of the finger contact signals with obtaining the optical marker signals in a motion capture system. Preliminary experiments have shown that the new device could detect the timing of finger contacts with better precision than the existing devices. This new device will be used intensively in future experiments to better understand the human grasping behavior.