001, uploaded March 20, 2010

Experiment Title:

Haptic Characteristics of some Activities of Daily Living

Authors:

Brittany Redmond, Rachel Aina, Tejaswi Gorti and Blake Hannaford

Description:

Activities of daily living (ADLs) are of interest in rehabilitation, independent living for the elderly and infirm, and to the designers of everyday objects. This paper reports measurements of forces and torques at the interaction point between users and some everyday objects in ADLs. We report force and torque recordings of several writing tasks with pen and pencil, opening and closing a jar, and dialing and texting with a cell phone. Besides average measurements, we measured some statistically significant differences between some very similar activities. For example, RMS forces in writing tasks were lower with pencil than ball-point pen, dialing a number showed lower forces than texting, and texting forces differed between ABC and T9 texting methods.

Links

Here is a link to the paper to appear in 2010 North American Haptics Symposium,
Haptic Characteristics of Some Activites of Daily Living

Scripting Files for Data Handling

Download the scripting files here

Data Files

Download the data files here

Notes on Data Format

The .dat files begin with a header which includes the subjects id number, the filename, and the time and date of the experiment. The data is then broken into 10 columns. The first column corresponds to the frame number, and second column is the time in seconds. The next three columns are the force in the x, y, and z direction, followed by three columns of the torque values in the x,y, and z direction. The last two columns reflect the tagging of the files, which will change when the .dat files are run thorugh MATLAB.

Running the MATLAB Scripts:

  • After running the multiplefiles_withtagging.m script, the user will be prompted to chose files to analyze.
  • The user must choose at least 2 files, but there is no limit to the number of total files they can analyze.
  • The m file tags the data by designating data points as either a 0 or a 1. A 0 corresponds to data points below a certain threshold force, reflecting no activity during the experiment. A 1 corresponds to data points above the threshold, reflecting time when a force was applied during the experiment.
  • The user is then prompted to choose which tag they would like to analyze.
  • After a tag is chosen, RMS Force and Torque values are calculated and analysis plots are created.
  • The user then has the option of saving the data.