A robotic exoskeleton could train people to move their fingers more quickly
shinichi furuya
A robotic hand exoskeleton could help expert pianists learn to play even faster by moving their fingers.
Robotic exoskeletons have long been used to rehabilitate people who can no longer use their hands due to an injury or medical condition, but they have been used less frequently to improve the abilities of able-bodied people. Is.
Now, shinichi Furuya and his colleagues at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo have found that a robotic exoskeleton can improve the finger speed of trained pianists after a 30-minute training session.
“I’m a pianist, but I hurt my hand because I practiced too much,” says Furuya. “I suffered from this dilemma between excessive practice and injury prevention, so I thought, I’d rather not practice. “You have to think of some way to improve your skills.”
Furuya remembered his teacher placing his hands on him and showing him how to play certain pieces. “I understood it intuitively or more intuitively, without using any words,” he says, which made him wonder whether a robot might be able to replicate this effect.
The robotic exoskeleton can raise and lower each finger individually, up to four times a second, using a separate motor attached to the base of each finger.
To test the device, researchers recruited 118 expert pianists who were before the age of 8 and had played for at least 10,000 hours, and asked them to practice a piece for two weeks, until That they couldn’t improve.
Then, the pianists received a 30-minute training session with the exoskeleton, in which the fingers of their right hand were moved slowly or quickly in various combinations of simple and complex patterns, so that Furuya and his colleagues could learn which. This type of movement led to improvement.
Pianists who experienced fast and complex training could better coordinate the movements of their right hand and move the fingers of both hands faster, both immediately after the training and a day later. This, along with evidence from brain scans, indicates that the training changed pianists’ sensory cortices to better control finger movements in general, says Furuya.
“This is the first time I’ve seen someone use (robotic exoskeleton) to go beyond normal dexterity capabilities, to push your learning beyond what you can do naturally,” he says. Are nathan lepora University of Bristol, UK. “It’s a bit counterintuitive as to why it worked, because you would have thought that actually doing voluntary movements on your own would be the way to learn, but it seems that passive activities work.”
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(tagstotranslate)music