Bagce Hamid F, Saleh Soha, Adamovich Sergei V, Tunik Eugene
School of Health Related Professions, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Medicine and Dentistry, Newark, NJ 07107, USA.
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2011;2011:7262-5. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6091835.
Virtual reality (VR) applications are rapidly permeating fields such as medicine, rehabilitation, research, and military training. However, VR-induced effects on human performance remain poorly understood, particularly in relation to fine-grained motor control of the hand and fingers. We designed a novel virtual reality environment suitable for hand-finger interactions and examined the ability to use visual feedback manipulations in VR to affect online motor performance. Ten healthy subjects performed a simple finger flexion movement toward a kinesthetically-defined 45° target angle while receiving one of three types of VR-based visual feedback in real-time: veridical (in which the virtual hand motion corresponded to subjects' actual motion), or scaled-down / scaled-up feedback (in which virtual finger motion was scaled by 25% / 175% relative to actual motion). Scaled down-and scaled-up feedback led to significant online modifications (increases and decreases, respectively) in angular excursion, despite explicit instructions for subjects to maintain constant movements across conditions. The latency of these modifications was similar across conditions. These findings demonstrate that a VR-based platform may be a robust medium for presenting visuomotor discordances to engender a sense of ownership and drive sensorimotor adaptation for (retraining motor skills. This may prove to be particularly important for retraining motor skills in patients with neurologically-based movement disorders.
虚拟现实（VR）应用正在迅速渗透到医学、康复、研究和军事训练等领域。然而，VR对人类表现的影响仍知之甚少，尤其是在手部和手指的精细运动控制方面。我们设计了一种适用于手-指交互的新型虚拟现实环境，并研究了在VR中使用视觉反馈操作来影响在线运动表现的能力。十名健康受试者在朝着通过动觉定义的45°目标角度进行简单的手指弯曲运动时，实时接收三种基于VR的视觉反馈之一：真实反馈（其中虚拟手部运动与受试者的实际运动相对应），或缩小/放大反馈（其中虚拟手指运动相对于实际运动按25%/175%进行缩放）。尽管明确指示受试者在不同条件下保持恒定运动，但缩小和放大反馈分别导致了角度偏移的显著在线改变（增加和减少）。这些改变的潜伏期在不同条件下相似。这些发现表明，基于VR的平台可能是一种强大的媒介，用于呈现视觉运动不一致，以产生拥有感并驱动感觉运动适应（重新训练运动技能）。这对于重新训练患有神经源性运动障碍患者的运动技能可能尤为重要。
