Hand Exercise Using a Haptic Device

It is known that the brain uses the sense of touch, in different parts of the body, to acquire information to react to the environment. With nowadays technology, it is possible to create distinct virtual environments and to feel them with haptic devices. Using haptic devices, it is possible to train and develop different parts of the human body, including the brain. These devices allow users to feel and touch virtual objects with a high realism. The present paper proposes different controller methods to use a haptic device to help the user to exercise their hands. The hand exercises proposed are the straight-line, square, circle and ellipse follow-up. In this work four different types of controllers are compared: proportional, proportional-derivative and logarithmic and sigmoid function based controllers. Each one of the used controllers were tested with the hand exercises mentioned. The sigmoid and logarithmic function based controllers achieves more suitable results for the user haptic perception and trajectory follow-up.