IEEE Trans Haptics. 2021 Apr-Jun;14(2):297-302. doi: 10.1109/TOH.2021.3077492. Epub 2021 Jun 17.
The current practice of administering neurofeedback using the patients' visual and/or auditory channel(s) is known to cause fatigue, excessive boredom, and restricted mobility during prolonged therapy sessions. This paper proposes haptics as an alternative means to provide neurofeedback and investigates its effectiveness by conducting two user studies (Study- I & II) using a novel compact wearable haptic device that provides vibrotactile feedback to the user's neck. Each user study has three neurofeedback modes: visual-only, haptics-only, and visual-and-haptics combined. Study- I examines the participant's performance in a brain-training task by measuring their attention level (AL) and the task completion time (CT). Study- II, in addition to the brain-training task, investigates the participants' ability to perform a secondary task (playing a shape-sorting game) while receiving the neurofeedback. Results show that users performed similarly well in brain-training with haptics-only and visual-only feedback. However, when engaged in a secondary task, the users performed significantly better (AL and CT improved around 11% and 17%, respectively) with haptics, indicating a clear advantage of haptics over visual neurofeedback. Being able to perform routine activities during brain-training would likely increase user adherence to longer therapy sessions. In the future, we plan to verify these findings by conducting experiments on ADHD-patients.
目前，使用患者的视觉和/或听觉通道来进行神经反馈的做法会导致在长时间的治疗过程中疲劳、过度无聊和活动受限。本文提出触觉作为提供神经反馈的另一种手段，并通过使用一种新型紧凑的可穿戴触觉设备进行了两项用户研究（研究 I 和研究 II）来研究其有效性，该设备向用户的颈部提供振动触觉反馈。每个用户研究都有三种神经反馈模式：仅视觉、仅触觉和视觉与触觉相结合。研究 I 通过测量参与者的注意力水平 (AL) 和任务完成时间 (CT) 来检查他们在大脑训练任务中的表现。研究 II 除了大脑训练任务外，还调查了参与者在接收神经反馈时执行次要任务（玩形状分类游戏）的能力。结果表明，用户在仅视觉和仅触觉反馈的大脑训练中表现相似。然而，当参与次要任务时，用户的表现明显更好（AL 和 CT 分别提高了约 11%和 17%），这表明触觉比视觉神经反馈具有明显优势。在大脑训练期间能够进行日常活动，可能会增加用户对更长治疗时间的依从性。未来，我们计划通过对 ADHD 患者进行实验来验证这些发现。
