Exploring the Potential of Modifying Visual Stimuli in Virtual Reality to Reduce Hand Tremor in Micromanipulation Tasks

Abstract

Involuntary hand tremor has been a serious challenge in micromanipulation tasks and thus draws a significant amount of attention from related fields. To minimize the effect of the hand tremor, a variety of mechanically assistive solutions have been proposed. However, approaches increasing human awareness of their own hand tremor have not been extensively studied. In this paper, a head mount display based virtual reality (VR) system to increase human self-awareness of hand tremor is proposed. It shows a user a virtual image of a handheld device with emphasized hand tremor information. Provided with this emphasized tremor information, we hypothesize that subjects will control their hand tremor more effectively. Two methods of emphasizing hand tremor information are demonstrated: (1) direct amplification of tremor and (2) magnification of virtual object, in comparison to the controlled condition without emphasized tremor information. A human-subject study with twelve trials was conducted, with four healthy participants who performed a task of holding a handheld gripper device in a specific direction. The results showed that the proposed methods achieved a reduced level of hand tremor compared with the control condition. © 2017 Current Optics and Photonics.