Preliminary testing of eye gaze interfaces for controlling a haptic system intended to support play in children with physical impairments: Attentive versus explicit interfaces.

Introduction: Children with physical impairments may face challenges to play because of their motor impairments, which could lead to negative impacts in their development. The objective of this article was to compare two eye gaze interfaces that identified the desired toy a user wanted to reach with a haptic-enabled telerobotic system in a play activity.

Methods: One of the interfaces was an attentive user interface predicted the toy that children wanted to reach by observing where they incidentally focused their gaze.

Supporting Play by Applying Haptic Guidance Along a Surface Learnt from Single Motion Trajectories.

Haptic-enabled teleoperated robots can help children with physical disabilities to reach toys by applying haptic guidance towards their toys, thus compensating for their limitations in reaching and manipulating objects. In this article we preliminarily tested a learning from demonstration (LfD) approach, where a robotic system learnt the surface that best approximated to all motion trajectories demonstrated by the participants while playing a whack-a-mole game. The end-goal of the system is for therapists or parents to demonstrate to it how to play a game, and then be used by children with physical disabilities.