Effect of Haptic Assistance Strategy on Mental Engagement in Fine Motor Tasks

This study investigates the effect of haptic control strategies on a subject's mental engagement during a fine motor handwriting rehabilitation task. The considered control strategies include an error-reduction (ER) and an error-augmentation (EA), which are tested on both dominant and non-dominant hand. A non-invasive brain-computer interface is used to monitor the electroencephalogram (EEG) activities of the subjects and evaluate the subject's mental engagement using the power of multiple frequency bands (theta, alpha, and beta). Statistical analysis of the effect of the control strategy on mental engagement revealed that the choice of the haptic control strategy has a significant effect (p < 0.001) on mental engagement depending on the type of hand (dominant or non-dominant). Among the evaluated strategies, EA is shown to be more mentally engaging when compared with the ER under the non-dominant hand.