Funding outcome

Children rely heavily on object exploration to learn about the world and develop cognitive and social skills. However, children with motor impairments have difficulty with object manipulation and miss out on important exploratory and developmental opportunities. Through assistive robotics, children with motor impairments can better manipulate objects, compensating for physical limitations that normally impair exploration. Unfortunately, the use of assistive robotics for exploratory tasks is under-researched, and previous robotic systems only allow visual feedback for the user. In addition, many properties of objects (eg. roughness and hardness) can only be explored through touch. By adding haptic (touch) feedback to the robotic interface we will offer an active touch experience to enhance children's development. We must determine if a haptic interface can accurately inform users about objects around them. We will optimize the interface and run trial sessions, presenting subjects with contrasting object pairs and asking them to assess the objects based on a particular feature- such as roughness. Galvanic skin response may also yield data about the difficulty /stressfulness of each task. Analyzing behavioural data will determine the accuracy of choices in each object comparison. We expect that the interface will be quite accurate for object exploration, with room for future improvement.