A Haptics-Enabled Rehabilitation Design Project for a Control Systems Course

This paper presents an interesting design project f or the Control Systems course offered to Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering senior students. Students designed real-time control systems that involve hap tic effects, meaning force feedback applied to the user by a motorized device as part of the human -computer interface. The main goal of this project is to design haptics-enabled rehabilitation exercises to help post-stroke patients regain their fine-motor skills. The different approaches taken by the multidiscipli nary teams are presented, and feedback from students are analyzed. This project familiarized students with the Matlab/Simulink based software platform for the imp lementation of hardware-in-the-loop systems, and improved their understanding of the so cial impact of engineering solutions. 1. An overview on haptics and its relation to undergraduate engineering education Haptics, originating from the Greek word “haptikos” meaning “able to touch”, refers to working with the sense of touch. A haptic interface is a hu man-computer interface that provides force or touch feedback to the user through a motorized devi ce and haptic rendering software. The haptics technology, combined with virtual reality a nd/or telerobotics technologies, has undergone rapid development with medical, educational, automo tive, industrial and other applications in the past decade, with the contributions of numerous aca demic and industrial research groups worldwide. Some engineering educators with a research backgrou nd in haptics have attempted to incorporate haptics into their undergraduate and graduate curri cula. One approach is to use haptics enabled computer simulations to assist the teaching of engi neer ng subjects such as physics, statics, dynamics, control systems, etc. . Computer simulations and animations that allow st udents to feel the responses of systems make learning more en gaging and fun, and also help students understand the course concepts better. Another appr o ch is to offer a course on haptics. The advancement of haptics technology relies on the com bined effort of electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, computer scien ce, biomedical engineering, and psychophysics. Therefore, haptics courses can be of fered to students from different engineering disciplines. However, complete haptic courses are n o mally offered at the graduate level since it requires undergraduate level courses such as contro l systems, robotics, C++ programming, computer graphics, etc. as prerequisites.