Our Device
Hardware
Digital Servos
The use of digital servos allows for effective translation of a patient’s index and middle finger for the purpose of guidance through an exciting rehabilitative experience. An operating angle of 90 degrees is managed so that the user can regain control of their fingers’ range of motion. As numerically-backed progress is made, changes in sensitivity of said components are made so that new challenges expedite the user’s recovery.
Structural Support
Physical therapy can be exhausting, the structure of our device is built to carefully support the patient and guide the user to an ideal position for which prolonged sessions of rehabilitation will be the least disconcerting. Finger stops are placed at the top front of the device to keep the index and middle fingers secured in the digital servos’ work area.Software
To provide our patients something familiar and easy to understand, our team has chosen Space Invaders as the game to base our’s off of. We felt that the controls of Space Invaders were simple enough to be intuitively understood and could work analogously along with our automated finger movement to almost mimic the movement of the spaceship in the game. Since the finger platform will move in the same way and position that the spaceship will move in the game, eliminating the image of the spaceship during the game will compel the patient to identify where the spaceship is based on where they feel that their finger is. With a limited number of bullets to use, the patient will not be able to “cheat” by shooting several bullets at once just to win the game. After all levels are complete, the game will output data that interprets the patient’s accuracy in each level. To accommodate for our project’s data acquisition, processing, and analysis, we programmed the game and its peripherals completely from scratch using Python and the pygame library.
