Wearable Sensors for Spatio-Temporal Grip Force Profiling
This work addresses the need for detailed grip force monitoring in precision tasks, but it is incremental as it applies existing wearable sensor technology to a new application with limited user data.
The study tackled the problem of analyzing individual grip force profiles during a precision task using a wearable sensor glove, revealing specific differences in grip forces based on user skill level and time from data collected from three users over ten sessions.
Wearable biosensor technology enables real-time, convenient, and continuous monitoring of users behavioral signals. Such include signals relative to body motion, body temperature, biological or biochemical markers, and individual grip forces, which are studied in this paper. A four step pick and drop image guided and robot assisted precision task has been designed for exploiting a wearable wireless sensor glove system. Individual spatio temporal grip forces are analyzed on the basis of thousands of individual sensor data, collected from different locations on the dominant and non-dominant hands of each of three users in ten successive task sessions. Statistical comparisons reveal specific differences between grip force profiles of the individual users as a function of task skill level (expertise) and time.