This ongoing project concerns the design of a ‘gym’ device for recovering stroke victims. The device consists of a strap attached to a motorized pulley in its turn connected to a computer programmed to control and document the work of the pulley and a human subject pulling and releasing the strap. The exercise by the subject is felt to aid recovery of muscle control and strength.
Our goal in the project is to explore the possibility of describing the exercise involving the device and a human subject as interaction. Moreover, the project seeks to investigate if the human subject demonstrably understands the exercise interaction in terms of sequentially ordered relevant actions. This, we hypothesize, may increase the possibility that the ’conduct’ of the device makes ’good sense’ to the human subject and hence increases his or her motivation for continuing to interact with it. In this way, the use of an impaired limb is embedded in, what is for the human subject, a sensible course of action and through which an embodied sense of the limb is regained.
(Dennis Day and Gitte Rasmussen)
Data: Video recordings and subsequent interviews of people using the device
Benefits: Better rehabilitation for stroke victims
Research question: Can kinesthetic communication interaction improve proprioception of a limb affected by stroke?
Publications:
Sørensen, A. S., Rasmussen, G. & Day, D. 2014. Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, p. 292-293.