Positive Technology Journal

This free-downloadable report by Huiyu Zhou and Huosheng Hu from Essex University (UK) reviews recent progress in human movement tracking systems in general, and stroke rehabilitation in particular.

It is a wonderful resource for all researchers interested in technology-enhanced rehabilitation after stroke

Sept. 27 issue of Neurology reports results of a study, which has investigated the effect of simulator-based training on driving after stroke. The research has involved 83 subacute stroke patients randomly assigned to either simulator-based training or control group. Then, all patients were evaluated in off-road and on-road performance tests to assess their driving ability after training. Results showed that virtual reality training improved driving ability, especially for well educated and less disabled stroke patients. However, authors warn that findings of the study may have been modified as a result of the large number of dropouts and the possibility of some neurologic recovery unrelated to training.

More to explore

A. E. Akinwuntan, W. De Weerdt, H. Feys, J. Pauwels, G. Baten, P. Arno, and C. Kiekens Effect of simulator training on driving after stroke: A randomized controlled trial, Neurology 2005 65: 843-850

Sveistrup, H. Motor rehabilitation using virtual reality, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2004, 1:10 (download full text)

Via Engadget

VirtuSphere is a 360-degree VR environment that allows for moving in any direction. The device consists of a large hollow sphere, placed on a special platform that allows the sphere to rotate in any direction as the user moves within it. Sensors under the sphere provide subject speed and direction to the computer running the simulation and users can interact with virtual objects using a special manipulator.

According to Virtusphere staff, the device has several potential applications in the field of training/simulations, health/rehabilitation, gaming and more. The device cost should range between $50K and $100K.

More to explore

VirtuSphere

Holo-Dek: A Unique Real-World Virtual Venue

CirculaFloor - Smart Tile Holodeck?

Via Wired

Dentists are starting to use eyeglass systems for easing patients' anxiety and pain during dental procedures. Introducing a distraction has long been known to help reduce pain for some people during surgical operations. Because virtual reality is a uniquely effective new form of distraction, it makes an ideal candidate for pain control.

More to explore

Virtual reality in pain therapy

Virtual reality in medicine

Via the Presence-L Listserv

(From The Seattle Times)

Christina Siderius, Monday, July 25, 2005

Walk in cyberspace: With virtual-reality software, users feel like they're moving even if they're actually sitting on the couch. VirtuSphere wanted to create a device that would allow the user to move limitlessly while using such software — without bumping into walls or falling over. The solution: VirtuSphere, founded in November, created a giant hollow ball that works like a spinning hamster wheel.

Wearing a head-mounted display, a user can step inside the 8.5-foot-tall sphere and experience physical movements while the mind is in cyberspace. "The purpose is to enable natural motion," said Palladin. "You can walk and there is no limit."

How it works: As the user moves, the ball rolls, sending coordinates to a computer. The computer evaluates the information and relays it back to the user's display in the form of a changed view. The sphere, which costs between $50,000 and $100,000, can be made compatible with any computer-based simulations.. READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Tom's hardware guide

Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) offers treatment using simulated real life experience provided in a confidential setting. VRT has shown its effectiveness in several common phobias, including claustrophobia, fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of driving, fear of flying, and fear of public speaking. As a person goes through the VR program, the therapist teaches the client relaxation techniques to deal with the symptoms provoked by exposure to the virtual environment.
However, until recently, the use of VRT was severely limited by the lack of inexpensive immersive equipment. This opportunity could come along in the fourth quarter of this year, when 3001AD, a company that builds high-end VR machines for large-scale entertainment centers, will introduce a headset that can be used in combination with the Xbox and the Playstation game consoles and several blockbuster game titles. The system, called "Trimersion" and recently demonstrated at the E3 trade show, promises 360-degree head tracking, uses a binocular video subsystem and delivers a QVGA resolution (320 x 240). Mark Rifkin, senior vice president of 3001 AD suggested retail pricing to come in just under $500.

More to explore:

Cybertherapy.info the reference site for VR therapy

Virtual reality in behavioral neuroscience and beyond, Nature Neuroscience, 1089-1092, Oct. 2002

Virtual Reality Therapy, Harvard Mental Health Letter, on-line, April 2003

Fake worlds offer real medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, 290 (10), 2107-2109, 22/29 Oct 2003

Video games have been often criticized by for their negative psychological effects on children. However, a growing number of studies show that video game playing can be useful in health. In an editorial published on the authoritative British Medical Journal, Mark Griffiths, professor of gambling studies, describes how video games are used in health care. One innovative application is their use in pain management. The attention needed to play can distract the player from the sensation of pain, a strategy that has been reported and evaluated among paediatric patients.

Video games have also been used as a form of physiotherapy or occupational therapy in many different groups of people. Such games focus attention away from potential discomfort and, unlike more traditional therapeutic activities, they do not rely on passive movements and sometimes painful manipulation of the limbs.

Read the full-text article published on BMJ (2005;331:122-123)

07 April 2005
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition

Jenny Hogan Barry Fox

Imagine movies and computer games in which you get to smell, taste and perhaps even feel things. That's the tantalising prospect raised by a patent on a device for transmitting sensory data directly into the human brain - granted to none other than the entertainment giant Sony.

The technique suggested in the patent is entirely non-invasive. It describes a device that fires pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify firing patterns in targeted parts of the brain, creating "sensory experiences" ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds. This could give blind or deaf people the chance to see or hear, the patent claims.

While brain implants are becoming increasingly sophisticated, the only non-invasive ways of manipulating the brain remain crude. A technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation can activate nerves by using rapidly changing magnetic fields to induce currents in brain tissue. However, magnetic fields cannot be finely focused on small groups of brain cells, whereas ultrasound could be.

If the method described by Sony really does work, it could have all sorts of uses in research and medicine, even if it is not capable of evoking sensory experiences detailed enough for the entertainment purposes envisaged in the patent.

Details are sparse, and Sony declined New Scientist's request for an interview with the inventor, who is based in its offices in San Diego, California. However, independent experts are not dismissing the idea out of hand. "I looked at it and found it plausible," says Niels Birbaumer, a pioneering neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who has created devices that let people control devices via brain waves.

The application contains references to two scientific papers presenting research that could underpin the device. One, in an echo of Galvani's classic 18th-century experiments on frogs' legs that proved electricity can trigger nerve impulses, showed that certain kinds of ultrasound pulses can affect the excitability of nerves from a frog's leg. The author, Richard Mihran of the University of Colorado, Boulder, had no knowledge of the patent until New Scientist contacted him, but says he would be concerned about the proposed method's long-term safety.

Sony first submitted a patent application for the ultrasound method in 2000, which was granted in March 2003. Since then Sony has filed a series of continuations, most recently in December 2004 (US 2004/267118).

Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."

More to explore

Virtual Reality
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Matrix: the movie

Press releases

Australian IT - Sony patents 'real' Matrix
News24 - Sony eyes 'real-life Matrix'
Forbes.com - Sony takes first step to patent 'real-life Matrix
Dawn International - Real life Matrix in the making
Timesonline - Sony takes 3-D cinema directly to the brain
Australian Financial Review - First step to patent 'real-life Matrix'

From the "Presence" listserv

By ERIN BELL
September 23, 2004
Special to The Globe and Mail

Anyone who's used Sony's EyeToy for the PlayStation 2 console knows how much fun it can be to put yourself into a video game with the help of a camera. More advanced technology developed in Canada is being used to help people with special needs learn skills and experience things that used to be beyond their reach.

The technology comes from a partnership between integrator Xperiential Learning Solutions Inc. and Toronto developer Jestertek Inc. (formerly the Vivid Group), whose virtual reality systems have been installed in places ranging from museums and science centres to the hockey and basketball halls of fame.
The pair's Experiential Learning Product Suite is aimed at people with physical, mental or behavioural disabilities.

Xperiential's founder, Theo D'Hollander, has a son with autism and relatives who suffer from cerebral palsy and Down syndrome. "It made me realize that this whole area [of technology for people with disabilities] is almost like a generation behind, it's in the industrial age when the rest of the world is in the Internet age," he said. "Today's technology is great for things like information gathering, but it has actually created more distance between people with disabilities and the life or job opportunities they need. The answer is to use technology to help create new experiences for them."

Like Sony's EyeToy, the Experiential Learning Product Suite uses cameras to capture a person's image and project it onto a monitor or large screen, combining it in real-time with the computer-generated action. The player can participate in virtual reality scenarios such as snowboarding, soccer, boxing, racing, and even mountain climbing, controlling the action by moving parts of their body. It's there the similarities cease, however.

Using cameras that capture at least 30 frames a second and hardware much more powerful than a game console, the suite can adapt to a player's physical characteristics and abilities.
Sensitivity, speed and range of motion are adjustable, allowing people to control programs with tiny gestures -- from a shrug to a toe-twitch -- letting a bedridden person see what it's like to ride a horse, or someone without the use of their hands play a virtual musical instrument.

The profile for each user can be fine-tuned as their mobility or skills improve. The partners are also working on a way to allow people to compete or collaborate on-line.

"It's very much a motivational experience for the kids or adults with disabilities who use the system," Jestertek president Vincent John Vincent said.

"Children with cognitive disabilities have short attention spans,"Mr. D'Hollander added. "With these programs, they're engaged by the games and music. There's something enticing about seeing themselves on television, and the idea that they're inside a computer game."

A study by the University of Ottawa is looking at ways to use the suite to make children's home-exercise rehabilitation programs more engaging.

"This gives people, especially those with some cognitive impairments or disabilities, the opportunity to have an experience that could not be possible otherwise," explained Dr. Heidi Seistrup, associate professor in the University's School of Rehabilitation Sciences.

"For example, they could play volleyball even though they're in a wheelchair, just by moving their fingers. The environment can be tweaked to allow someone with a very limited range of motion to play against someone who has a full range of motion. You put them on a level playing field, which you can't do in real life very easily."

In other cases, the suite is used to teach life skills. There are modules that can train people to sort a load of laundry, teach basic traffic safety, or show how to serve customers in a doughnut shop.

The system can be a social behaviour coach, too, Mr.
D'Hollander said. "Having a child with autism go to a family gathering at Christmas or go into a crowded mall is a big issue, because the initial encounter is so intense they can't handle it.
We can create a tape of family settings or a mall, and allow children to get used to it by interacting with [the virtual crowd] before they encounter the real thing, helping them over that social hurdle."

A site licence for the Experiential Learning Product Suite is $5,600 (including hardware for a single user and several dozen applications), and systems for additional users can be purchased for around $750 each. There's also a basic unit that sells for around $400, including about a dozen games, to deliver extra entertainment and exercise-related programs in a home setting.

Over the past several months, Xperiential has sold about 30 site licences to community living homes, rehabilitation centres and school boards across Ontario, as well as to customers in the United States and Europe, Mr. D'Hollander said.

A unit was recently installed at Community Living Oakville in Oakville, Ont. "We use it three times a week, and it's awesome,"
day service worker Kelleigh Melito said. "They love the dancing, racing and snowboarding. Because of our location, they can't get out much to go for walks, because there are no sidewalks; this is how they get their exercise."

Don Seymour, executive director of developmental services for Lambton County, Ont., said he hopes to use the virtual reality units in all the special needs homes under his jurisdiction.

"I watched a fellow we support who is in a wheelchair get in front of the camera and look at the screen, and all of a sudden realize he was in a racecar," Mr. Seymour said. "All he had to do was move his shoulders to race this car around a track. For a person who has limited mobility with their arms or legs, to be able to steer a racecar on a big screen was incredible."

"You hear about this stuff a dozen times in a year, and then to actually find something that has immediate flexibility to our folks is quite something," he added.

From Israel21c, "A focus beyond conflict"

Most people have never witnessed a terror attack. But the graphic depiction of a suicide bus bombing on the computer screen that Prof. Patrice (Tamar) Weiss is displaying seems vividly real.

Watching it - in three dimensions and full sound while wearing a head-mounted display helmet -may help hundreds of Israelis who have witnessed real terror attacks overcome post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and is the basis of a new therapy for treating particularly resistant cases of PTSD.


The treatment is just one of dozens of novel applications of virtual reality (VR) technology which were demonstrated recently at the University of Haifa during the Third VR Symposium. Weiss, the person who brought together many of the world's leading VR wizards - and who is herself involved in several cutting edge VR applications, is a strictly observant Israeli who lives in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of B'nai Brak.

"It's not exactly normal," admits Weiss to ISRAEL21c, laughing at the contrast between her traditional way of life and the 'Brave New World' that characterizes her professional pursuits.

But Weiss sees no contradiction between the two. "I have always been interested in different technologies and my goal has always been to help people," says the researcher, whose library has volumes of Psalms and kinesiology textbooks side by side.

An occupational therapist by training, Weiss grew up in Canada and taught at McGill University in Montreal for many years, before immigrating to Israel in 1991 with her Israel-born husband. For the last four years she has been a researcher and lecturer at the University of Haifa, and a member of its newly-established Laboratory for Innovations in Rehabilitation Technology.

Weiss's interest in VR was piqued when she read an article by one of the pioneers in the field, Prof. Albert 'Skip' Rizzo of the University of Southern California, nearly a decade ago. That ultimately led to a close collaboration with Rizzo, who also attended this month's symposium.

What interests her about the field? "Look at this," says Weiss, showing a videotape of a woman with a spinal cord injury doing traditional physiotherapy. The therapist hands her a plastic ring which she must grasp without losing her balance - then another ring, and another, and another. "Let's face it. It's very static and very boring."

Now she shows a videotape of another patient who is also learning to balance himself - only he is watching himself on a giant screen, against a breath-taking mountain backdrop, swatting at balls in the sky. Every ball he hits turns into a colourful bird. The scene is virtual, but the man's movements - he is leaping and swatting with increasing determination - are very real.

"It's interesting and motivating," explains Weiss. "I have yet to meet a patient - of any age - who didn't like it. So it's very effective." (In a newer version, she notes excitedly, patients will wear a glove which vibrates whenever they make contact with a virtual ball - further increasing the sense of realness.)

The symposium Weiss organized, which brought leading VR experts from the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Israel, to Haifa showed the dizzying range of new VR technologies dedicated to health and rehabilitation - from a robotic dog, who can be a reliable companion for the elderly - "no need to feed him or take him for walks," noted the researcher who demonstrated the small, black, yelping Sony invention - to 3D interactive games that could some day be used for early diagnoses of Alzheimer's disease, treatment of attention deficit disorder, and rehabilitation of patients who have suffered central nervous system injuries.

"Virtual reality has completely revolutionized the field of occupational therapy," says Weiss, who is personally involved in several innovative VR projects, including the simulated bus bombing program designed to treat Israelis suffering from severe post-traumatic stress.

That program - developed together with Dr. Naomi Josman, Prof.Eli Somer and Ayelet Reisberg, all of the University of Haifa, as well as with American researchers - is designed to expose patients in a controlled manner to the traumatic incident which they are often unable to remember, but which has a powerful and debilitating effect on their lives.

The realistic rendering of the bus bombing triggers the patient's memories - the first vital step on the path to overcoming trauma. (The simulation does not include all the gruesome details of the attack, but rather just enough to help the patient recall what happened.)

It was Josman who first came up with the idea of using such a treatment in Israel. She was attending a conference in the United States when she saw how University of Washington Prof. Hunter Hoffman had applied VR to successfully treat Americans suffering from PTSD following the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers.

Similar programs have also been used recently to help American veterans traumatized by their tour of duty in Iraq, and even Vietnam veterans for whom no other treatment has proven effective.

Through close collaboration with Hoffman, the U. of Haifa team developed an Israeli version of the program which is now being used to treat the first few patients.

"If our pilot study is effective, we will launch a full-scale clinical trial," says Weiss, "and hopefully we will be able to provide a solution for those PTSD patients who have been resistant to more traditional cognitive therapy."

In another application of VR technology, Weiss and U. of Haifa colleagues have developed a program to help stroke victims relearn the basic skills required to shop on their own. The patient composes a grocery list and makes his or her way through a 'virtual supermarket,' seeking the right products, pulling them off the shelves and into a shopping cart, while announcements of sales are broadcast on the loudspeaker system.

"It's the first such program designed to improve both cognitive and motor skills of stroke victims," she notes.

Last week, the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF) invited Weiss to join its Academy of Research, the highest scholarly honor that the AOTF confers.

"Your work clearly helps to move the profession ahead, and demonstrates powerful evidence of the importance of assistive technology in helping persons with disabilities participate in the occupations of their choice, while improving the quality of their lives," the AOTF wrote in its letter to Weiss.

For Weiss, virtual reality is not only the focus of research, but a way of life - at least in her work. She communicates with her colleagues around the world by tele-conference and, of course, email - and notes that she has never even met her close collaborator Hoffman even though they have been
communicating several times a week for years. She also taught an entire university course last semester - without ever attending a lecture hall. Instead, she sat in the comfort of her B'nai Brak home, wearing a headset and microphone to deliver a weekly videoconferenced lesson on assistance technology to students who sat in their own homes.

"They could see a video of me, and whenever a student wanted to speak I would see the icon of a hand being raised. We even had guest lecturers from abroad. The students really appreciated not having to come to the university late at night for the course," says Weiss, who was pleased to be able to - once again - harness technology to help make people's lives a little easier.

From BioMed Central

Virtual reality games can help alleviate pain in children being treated for severe injuries, according to research published in the Open Access, peer reviewed journal BMC Pediatrics.

Immersion in a virtual world of monsters and aliens helps children feel less pain during the treatment of severe injuries such as burns, according to a preliminary study by Karen Grimmer and colleagues from the Women's and Children's Hospital in Adelaide, Australia.

A virtual reality game is a computer game especially designed to completely immerse the user in a simulated environment. Unlike other computer games, the game is played wearing a special headset with two small computer screens and a special sensor, which allows the player to interact with the game and feel a part of its almost dreamlike world. "Owing to its ability to allow the user to immerse and interact with the artificial environment that he/she can visualize, the game-playing experience is engrossing", explain the authors.

Children with severe burns suffer great pain and emotional trauma, especially during the cleaning and dressing of their wounds. They are usually given strong painkiller drugs, muscle relaxants or sedatives, but these are often not enough to completely alleviate pain and anxiety. These medications also have side effects such as drowsiness, nausea or lack of energy.

Grimmer and colleagues asked seven children, aged five to eighteen, to play a virtual reality game while their dressing was being changed. The children were also given the usual amount of painkillers. The researchers assessed the pain the children felt when they were playing and then compared it to the amount of pain felt when painkillers were used alone.

To measure the intensity of the pain, the team used the Faces Scale, which attributes a score from 0 to 10, wherein 10 represents maximum pain, to a facial manifestation of pain. For younger children they used 5 different faces representing no pain to very bad pain. The researchers also interviewed the nurses and parents present during the dressing change.

The average pain score when the children received painkillers alone was 4.1/10. It decreased to 1.3/10 when the children had played a game and been given painkillers. Because the sample size was so small the researchers analysed their results per child, and they found that all but one child lost at least 2 points on the scale when they were playing the game. The parents and nurses confirmed these results and said that the children clearly showed less signs of pain when they played the game.

"We found that virtual reality coupled with analgesics was significantly more effective in reducing pain responses in children than analgesic only" conclude the authors.

This is only a preliminary study, but the researchers are hopeful. They propose to test virtual reality on more subjects, possibly with games appropriate to each age group, in the hope that it could one day greatly reduce, if not completely replace, the use of painkillers.

This press release is based on the article:
The efficacy of playing a virtual reality game in modulating pain for children with acute burn injuries: A single blinded randomized controlled trial Debashish Das, Karen Grimmer, Tony Sparnon, Sarah McRae, Bruce Thomas BMC Pediatrics 2005 4:27 (3 March 2005)

From WIRED

By Kristen Philipkoski

Medical technology was supposed to remove problems caused by fallible humans: inaccurate prescriptions, wrong diagnoses and inappropriate therapies. But recent studies have shown that some technologies have caused more problems than they've solved.

Nevertheless, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, which provides health insurance to seniors and the poor, is giving a few technologies a shot at improving the government organization's dismal track record managing patients with chronic conditions.

Medicare's history of not adequately covering preventive health services has created a culture of patients waiting until things get really bad before they'll head to the hospital. Such acute care is far more expensive than the ongoing maintenance that can fend off emergencies in the first place.

As part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, CMS is sponsoring nine pilot projects involving 180,000 patients and using technologies administrators hope will improve preventive care. Officials anticipate that the program could, for example, help a diabetes patient get to the doctor before she requires a leg amputation, or allow a doctor to begin a new prescription or diet before his patient suffers heart failure.

How expensive is chronic care? Two-thirds of Medicare money ($236.5 billion in 2001) is spent on just 20 percent of those enrolled, according to a 2002 report (.pdf) from Partnership for Solutions, a group that studies chronic health conditions. Everyone in that 20 percent is coping with five or more chronic conditions. The first of the baby boomers officially become seniors in 2011, and it is clear Medicare needs help, particularly in its chronic-care approach.

"This needs to happen anyway," said Sandy Foote, senior adviser for the Chronic Care Improvement Program at CMS.

CMS has chosen patients with chronic-care needs to participate in pilot projects that will implement technologies ranging from automated phone reminder systems and interactive in-home devices that ask patients questions about their health to hospital technologies for physicians.

CMS is paying health-management organizations like McKesson and Health Dialog to deliver technologies to those patients. But if after three years Medicare doesn't see a substantial improvement in health benefits and costs compared to a randomly selected group of about 100,000 control patients, CMS will ask for an unspecified portion of the fees back.

"We're not going to lock into a technology that may very well be outdated soon," Foote said. "We're paying organizations to help people in very individualized, very personalized ways to reduce their health risks, and they can keep refining how they do that."

That means, for example, McKesson is also not bound by the technologies it has chosen to implement. If something looks like it's not benefiting -- or actually is hindering -- patients or physicians, McKesson or any of the other management organizations can nix a technology for one that might work better.

The program sets up an exceptional potential for change and innovation in a hefty, bureaucratic government organization. And recent studies showing the failure of some medical technologies suggest that flexibility might be a good thing.

Two studies published in the March 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that technologies designed to make physicians' jobs easier sometimes didn't, and in some cases the tools actually made the doctors' work more difficult.

"The system should not control the process of doing medicine but respond to how the hospital works," said the University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Ross Koppel, the lead author of the JAMA study. "Very often the software designers expect the users to wrap themselves like pretzels around the software, rather than making it respond to the hospital's needs."

FROM THE PRESENCE-L LISTSERV: (From UB News, the news service of the University of Buffalo)

Virtual-Reality Movies Put a New Face on "User-Friendly"

Intense psychological drama requires computer agents to be "more human"

Release date: Thursday, February 24, 2005

Retrieved from: the PRESENCE - Listserve

It hasn’t yet, but the underlying concept is intriguing -- the idea that you could take one of the causes of childhood obesity and re-engineer it as part of the solution.

It may sound like science fiction, but it’s exactly what Bob Verdun, the new director of the Pawtucket Family YMCA, wants to achieve with a cutting-edge piece of fitness equipment called the Trazer.

The Trazer is a serious machine, using optical sensors, an electronic "beacon," and interactive, virtual reality software to facilitate exercise training, sports testing and rehabilitation -- but Verdun is more interested in its kid-appeal.

That’s because the Trazer is the fitness equivalent of the nutritious Twinkie: A virtual reality video game designed to make excise universally accessible and, believe it or not, fun.

"There is a resistance for kids who are not good at team sports to join a school team, and these are usually the kids who need exercise the most," said Ray Giannelli, the senior vice president of research and development for Cybex International, the Massachusetts-based company that will ship three of the first production Trazers to Pawtucket this spring.

The Trazer, said Giannelli, will give sports-adverse kids a fighting chance to stay in shape by putting simple, effective exercises within the familiar context of a video game.

"A lot of kids today are on the computer all day, e-mailing or chatting or playing video games," said Verdun, "This is the perfect bridge to exercise, a viable way to win the war against childhood obesity."

Here’s how it works:

Optical sensors mounted beneath a sleek, high-definition video display are trained to register the movements of an electronic beacon in a 6-foot, three-dimensional space.

When the beacon is attached to a belt worn by the user, his or her movements are mimicked in real-time by a virtual character in a virtual world.

An easy-to-navigate options menu features interactive programs for performance testing and sports training, as well as rehabilitative movement therapy, kinesthetic learning and fitness fun.

There are programs designed for the elderly to help them strengthen neglected muscles and maintain a full range of motion, and games designed to keep kids excited about physical activity.

In one game called "Trap Attack," players are required to move their virtual self across a three-dimensional chessboard, in sync with a roving red cursor.

Play the game on a basic difficulty setting, and the cursor moves relatively slowly, one square at a time. Crank up the difficulty, and trapdoors will appear, forcing you to jump over them.

Another game, "Goalie Wars," allows the player to intercept and "catch" soccer balls thrown by a virtual goalie. Once caught, a ball can be thrown back by lunging forward, and if you fake-out your polygonal opponent, you score a point.

Although optical sensors and virtual reality video games are impressive, they’re not exactly new.

The real meat and potatoes of Trazer is its ability to analyze and tabulate the data it collects. While you play "Goalie Wars" or "Trap Attack," the Trazer is measuring your reaction time, acceleration, speed, power, balance, agility, jumping height, endurance, heart rate and caloric output.

These statistics are displayed and saved after the completion of each exercise, a feature which will allows serious athletes, convalescents and kids to quantify their performance and track their progress.

As they’re fond of saying at Cybex, Trazer has more in common with a flight simulator than an exercise machine.

The Trazer is a versatile exercise machine, but Verdun and his colleagues are hoping it will be a crowd-pleaser as well.

Although the Trazer is still in development, a video demonstration of its capabilities and a hands-on demonstration of the more conventional Cybex Arc Trainer -- a high-tech step- machine -- are expected to be the main attractions at the YMCA’s open house on Saturday.

Scheduled for Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., the open house is a sneak preview: a way to show current and prospective members what they can expect from the Y’s $8 million facelift -- a soup-to-nuts overhaul which will include renovated facilities, expanded program space and brand-new, state-of-the-art fitness equipment.

The ultimate goal is to make the YMCA more family-friendly and appeal to old people, young people and everyone in between. To Verdun’s thinking, what better way to bring the 115-year-old building into the realm of iPods and Instant Messages than a video game.

"We want parents and children to know that there isn’t anything they can’t do at our facility," Verdun said in a recent interview.
"Families can come here, exercise together, and share an experience that is affordable, safe and fun.

"You don’t think about moving around when you’re on the Trazer, and that’s exactly what we want. The essence of the YMCA is having fun."

From Wired

FROM THE PRESENCE-L LISTSERV:

From InformIT.com

Haptics: The Technology of Simulating Human Touch

Date: Jan 14, 2005
By Laurie Rowell.

When haptics research — that is, the technology of touch — moves from theory into hardware and software, it concentrates on two areas: tactile human-computer interfaces and devices that can mimic human physical touch. In both cases, that means focusing on artificial hands. Here you can delve into futuristic projects on simulating touch.


At a lunch table some time back, I listened to several of my colleagues eagerly describing the robots that would make their lives easier. Typical was the servo arm mounted on a sliding rod in the laundry room. It plucked dirty clothes from the hamper one at a time. Using information from the bar code—which new laws would insist be sewn into every label—the waldo would sort these items into a top, middle, or lower nylon sack.

As soon as a sack was full of, say, permanent press or delicates, the hand would tip the contents into the washing machine. In this way, garments could be shepherded through the entire cycle until the shirts were hung on a nearby rack, socks were matched and pulled together, and pajamas were patted smooth and stacked on the counter.

Sounds like a great idea, right? I mean, how hard could be for a robotic hand to feel its way around a collar until it connects with a label? As it turns out, that's pretty tricky. In fact, one of the things that keeps us from those robotic servants that we feel sure are our due and virtual reality that lets us ski without risking a broken leg is our limited knowledge of touch.

We understand quite a bit about how humans see and hear, and much of that information has been tested and refined by our interaction with computers over the past several years. But if we are going to get VR that really lets us practice our parasailing, the reality that we know has to be mapped and synthesized and presented to our touch so that it is effectively "fooled." And if we want androids that can sort the laundry, they have to be able to mimic the human tactile interface.

That leads us to the study of haptics, the technology of touch.

Research that explores the tactile intersection of humans and computers can be pretty theoretical, particularly when it veers into the realm of psychophysics. Psychophysics is the branch of experimental psychology that deals with the physical environment and the reactive perception of that environment.
Researchers in the field try, through experimentation, to determine parameters such as sensory thresholds for signal perception, to determine perceptual boundaries.

But once haptics research moves from theory into hardware and software, it concentrates on two primary areas of endeavor:
tactile human-computer interfaces and devices that can mimic human physical touch, most specifically and most commonly artificial hands.

Substitute Hands

A lot of information can be conveyed by the human hand.
Watching The Quiet Man the other night, I was struck by the scene in which the priest, played by Ward Bond, insists that Victor M shake hands with John Wayne. Angrily, M complies, but clearly the pressure he exerts far exceeds the requirements of the gesture. Both men are visibly "not wincing" as the Duke drawls, "I never could stand a flabby handshake myself."

When they release and back away from each other, the audience is left flexing its collective fingers in response.

In this particular exchange, complex social messages are presented to audience members, who recognize the indicators of pressure, position, and grip without being involved in the tactile cycle. Expecting mechanical hands to do all that ours can is a tall order, so researchers have been inching that way for a long time by making them do just some of the things ours can.

Teleoperators, for example, are distance-controlled robotic arms and hands that were first built to touch things too hot for humans to handle—specifically, radioactive substances in the Manhattan Project in the 1950s.

While operators had to be protected from radiation by a protective wall, the radioactive material itself had to be shaped with careful precision. A remote-controlled servo arm seemed like the perfect solution.

Accordingly, two identical mechanical arms were stationed on either side of a 1m-thick quartz window. The joints of one were connected to the joints of the other by means of pulleys and steel ribbons. In other words, whatever an operator made the arm do on one side of the barrier was echoed by the device on the other side.

These were effective and useful instruments, allowing the operator to move toxic substances from a remote location, but they were "dumb." They offered no electronic control and were not linked to a computer.

Modern researchers working on this problem would be concentrating now on devices that could "feel" the density, shape, and character of the materials that were perhaps miles away, seen only on a computer screen. This kind of teleoperator depends on a haptic interface and requires some understanding of how touch works.

Worlds in Your Hand

To build a mechanical eye—say, a camera—you need to study optics. To build a receiver, you need to understand acoustics and how these work with the human ear. Similarly, if you expect to build an artificial hand—or even a finger that perceives tactile sensation—you need to understand skin biomechanics.

At the MIT Touch Lab, where numerous projects in the realm of haptics are running at any given time, one project seeks to mimic the skin sensitivity of the primate fingertip as closely as possible, concentrating on having it react to touch as the human finger would.

The research is painstaking and exacting, involving, for example, precise friction and compressibility measurements of the fingerpads of human subjects. Fingertip dents and bends in response to edges, corners, and surfaces have provided additional data. At the same time, magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) and high-frequency ultrasound show how skin behaves in response to these stimuli on the physical plane.

Not satisfied with the close-ups that they could get from available devices, the team developed a new tool, the Ultrasound Backscatter Microscope (UBM), which shows the papillary ridges of the fingertip and the layers of skin underneath in far greater detail than an MRI.

As researchers test reactions to surfaces from human and monkey participants, the data they gather is mapped and recorded to emerging 2D and 3D fingertip models. At this MIT project and elsewhere, human and robot tactile sensing is simulated by means of an array of mechanosensors presented in some medium that can be pushed, pressed, or bent.

In the Realm of Illusion

Touch might well be the most basic of human senses, its complex messages easily understood and analyzed even by the crib and pacifier set. But what sets it apart from other senses is its dual communication conduit, allowing us to send information by the same route through which we perceive it. In other words, those same fingers that acknowledge your receipt of a handshake send data on their own.

In one project a few years back, Peter J. Berkelman and Ralph L.
Hollis began stretching reality in all sorts of bizarre ways. Not only could humans using their device touch things that weren't there, but they could reach into a three-dimensional landscape and, guided by the images appearing on a computer screen, move those objects around.

This was all done with a device built at the lab based on Lorentz force magnetic levitation (Lorenz force is the force exerted on a charged particle in an electromagnetic field). The design depended upon a magnetic tool levitated or suspended over a surface by means of electromagnetic coils.

To understand the design of this maglev device, imagine a mixing bowl with a joystick bar in the middle. Now imagine that the knob of the joystick floats barely above the stick, with six degrees of freedom. Coils, magnet assemblies, and sensor assemblies fill the basin, while a rubber ring makes the top comfortable for a human operator to rest a wrist. This whole business is set in the top of a desk-high metal box that holds the power supplies, amplifiers, and control processors.

Looking at objects on a computer screen, a human being could take hold of the levitated tool and try to manipulate the objects as they were displayed. Force-feedback data from the tool itself provided tactile information for holding, turning, and moving the virtual objects.

What might not be obvious from this description is that this model offered a marvel of economy, replacing the bulk of previous systems with an input device that had only one moving part.
Holding the tool—or perhaps pushing at it with a finger—the operator could "feel" the cube seen on the computer screen:
edges, corners, ridges, and flat surfaces. With practice, operators could use the feedback data to maneuver a virtual peg into a virtual hole with unnerving reliability.

Notice something here: An operator could receive tactile impressions of a virtual object projected on a screen. In other words, our perception of reality was starting to be seriously messed around with here.

HUI, Not GUI

Some of the most interesting work in understanding touch has been done to compensate for hearing, visual, or tactile impairments.

At Stanford, the TalkingGlove was designed to support individuals with hearing limitations. It recognized American Sign Language finger spelling to generate text on a screen or synthesize speech. This device applied a neural-net algorithm to map the movement of the human hand to an instrumented glove to produce a digital output. It was so successful that it spawned a commercial application in the Virtex Cyberglove, which was later purchased by Immersion and became simply the Cyberglove.
Current uses include virtual reality biomechanics and animation.

At Lund University in Sweden, work is being done in providing haptic interfaces for those with impaired vision. Visually impaired computer users have long had access to Braille displays or devices that provide synthesized speech, but these just give text, not graphics, something that can be pretty frustrating for those working in a visual medium like the Web. Haptic interfaces offer an alternative, allowing the user to feel shapes and textures that could approximate a graphical user interface.

At Stanford, this took shape in the 1990s as the "Moose," an experimental haptic mouse that gave new meaning to the terms drag and drop, allowing the user to feel a pull to suggest one and then feel the sudden loss of mass to signify the other. As users approached the edge of a window, they could feel the groove; a check box repelled or attracted, depending on whether it was checked. Some of the time, experimental speech synthesizers were used to "read" the text.

Such research has led to subsequent development of commercial haptic devices, such as the Logitech iFeel Mouse, offering the promise of new avenues into virtual words for the visually impaired.

Where Is This Taking Us?

How is all this research doing toward getting us to virtual realities and actual robot design? Immersion and other companies offer a variety of VR gadgets emerging from the study of haptics, but genuine simulated humans are pretty far out on the horizons.
What we have is a number of researchers around the globe working on perfecting robotic hands, trying to make them not only hold things securely, but also send and receive messages as our own do. Here is a representative sampling:

The BarrettHand
[]
BH8-262: Originally developed by Barrett Technology for NASA but now available commercially, it offers a three-fingered grasper with four degrees of freedom, embedded intelligence, and the ability to hold on to any geometric shape from any angle.

The Anatomically Correct Testbed (ACT) Hand
[]: A project at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, this is an ambitious effort to create a synthetic human hand for several purposes. These include having the hand function as a teleoperator or prosthetic, as an investigative tool for examining complex neural control of human hand movement, and as a model for surgeons working on damaged human hands. Still in its early stages, the project has created an actuated index finger that mimics human muscle behavior.

Cyberhand []: This collaboration of researchers and developers from Italy, Spain, Germany, and Denmark proposes to create a prosthetic hand that connects to remaining nerve tissue. It will use one set of electrodes to record and translate motor signals from the brain, and a second to pick up and conduct sensory signals from the artificial hand to nerves of the arm for transport through regular channels to the brain.

Research does not produce the products we'll be seeing in common use during the next few years. It produces their predecessors. But many of the scientists in these labs later create marketable devices. Keep an eye on these guys; they are the ones responsible for the world we'll be living in, the one with bionic replacement parts, robotic housekeepers, and gym equipment that will let us fly through virtual skies.

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Researchers at the University of Nottingham have developed a
virtual reality brain surgery simulator for trainee surgeons that
combines haptics with three-dimensional graphics to give what
they claim is the most realistic model in the world.

A 'map' of the brain surface is produced by the software, which
also renders the tweezers or other surgical implement and shows
any incisions made into the virtual brain. The simulator is
controlled by a device held by the user, which uses a robotic
mechanism to give the same pressure and resistance as it would
if it were touching a real brain.

Map of brain on virtual surgery simulator

Dr Michael Vloeberghs, senior lecturer in paediatric neurosurgery
at the University's School of Human Development, who led the
development team, said that the new system would benefit
trainees: "Traditionally a large amount of the training that
surgeons get is by observing and performing operations under

supervision. However, pressures on resources, staff shortages
and new EU directives on working hours mean that this teaching
time is getting less and less.

"This simulator will allow surgeons to become familiar with
instruments and practice brain surgery techniques with
absolutely no risk to the patient whatsoever."

The pilot software was developed with the Queen's Medical
Centre, in Nottingham, which contains a Simulation Centre in
which dummies are often used for surgical training.

Dr Vloeberghs says that the haptic system is an improvement on
the existing system: "Dummies can only go so far – you're still
limited by the physical precense, and you can't do major surgery
on dummies... you can simulate electrically and phonetically what
is happening, but nothing more than that."

Adib Becker, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the
university, said that the technology could be developed for the
future, and that brain surgery online could even be possible: "If
you project maybe four or five years from now, it may be possible
for a surgeon to operate on a patient totally remotely.

"So the surgeons would be located somewhere else in the world
and can communicate through the internet, and can actually feel
the operation as they are seeing it on the screen."

The team hopes that the piloted software, which was funded by a
grant of £300,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council (EPSRC), will help train surgeons to a higher
level before their first operation on live patients, thereby
increasing safety.