Skills:
teamwork;
interpersonal skills;
research paper writing;
critical thinking
HandMorph: a Passive Exoskeleton that Miniaturizes Grasp
Jun Nishida, Soichiro Matsuda, Hiroshi Mastsui, Shan-yuan Teng, Ziwei Liu, Kenji Suzuki, and Pedro Lopes.
ACM UIST User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, 2020
Motivation
Embodied interaction tells us that āhow we understand the world, ourselves, and interaction comes from our location in a physical and social worldā.
Researchers have turned to wearable devices that enable users to experience the sense of having a different body, such as size-illusions based on Virtual Reality.
Could we achieves this in the userās real environment, preserving the userās physical and social contexts?
HandMorph, a passive exoskeleton that miniaturizes grasp, provides a unique spin on wearables to passively simulate a child's hand and offers adults a new grasp of empathy while they can still interact with the physical world.
Contribution
In this project, I led the second user study to examine participantsā experiences with HandMorph and participated in paper writting.
To investigate whether HandMorph could assist in evaluating/designing products for people with smaller hands, I recruited eight participants to improve the design of a simple toy trumpet to be used by smaller persons, such as chilĀdren (ages 3-10).
We found that they felt more confident in their simple toy designs when using HandMorph to test their designās ergonomics.
And beyond...
Embodiment has been widly discussed across the fields of Neuroscience, Rehabilitation, Psychology, Robotics, and so on. I am also very interested in the concept of embodying foreign objects since it may enable new paradiams in HCI.
For instance, Human Computer Integration apply this concept to an extrem that the human body and machines become one. Will this be the future? Is it possible to change our implicit social bias by putting ourselves in other peopleās shoes bodies?
I led a reading group with my colleague Jun Nishida to review related literature and brianstorm with the HCI club at Uchicago. More details
Maybe instead of us trying to adopt a wearable, how about a co-adopt system?
I organized a gust talk from my former research advisor Dr. Helen Huang to discuss integration and co-adaptation of smart wearables and humans in neuromuscular rehabilitation.
Additionaly, my colleagues and I engineered and explored a wearable device with touch sensing and vibrotactile actuation based on a neuroscience principle for a future submission. More details can be found in the future.
