Fast and complex multi-finger movements generated by the hand exoskeleton. Credit: Shinichi Furuya
It is said that practice makes perfect fine motor skills, such as playing the piano. However, experienced musicians often experience a “ceiling effect” where their skill level plateaus after extensive training. Passive training with a robotic exoskeleton hand could help pianists overcome that ceiling effect, according to one researcher. paper Published in Science Robotics magazine.
“I’m a pianist, but [injured] “I stopped practicing because I practiced too much,” said co-author Shinichi Furuya of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. told to a new scientist. “I was struggling with the dilemma between over-practicing and preventing injury, so I decided I had to figure out a way to improve my skills without practicing.” He remembered putting his hands on him to teach him how to play, and he wondered if he could achieve the same effect using a robot hand.
Therefore, Furuya et al. used a custom-made exoskeleton robotic hand that could move each individual finger of the right hand independently and bend and straighten the joints as needed. According to the authors, previous research using robotic exoskeletons has focused on simpler movements, such as assisting in limb movements to stabilize body posture or assisting in grasping objects. This distinguishes the custom robotic hands used in these latest experiments from those used for haptics in virtual environments.
Helpful robot hand
A total of 118 pianists participated in three different experiments. In the first experiment, 30 pianists performed a designated “chord trill” motor task on their home pianos every day for two weeks. First, I hit the D and F keys simultaneously with my right index and ring fingers, and then the E and G keys with my right hand. middle and pinky fingers of the right hand. “We used this task because it was widely recognized to be technically difficult to perform quickly and accurately,” the authors explained. It appears in classical pieces such as Chopin’s etudes. 25. Maurice Ravel’s Ondine No. 6 and the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 3.