Haptic error fields for robotic training

Error feedback is critical for supporting motor adaptation in rehabilitation, sports, piloting, and skilled manual tasks. Error augmentation interventions, in which participants' errors are amplified with either visual or haptic feedback during training has shown success over repetitive practice. Here we show that the statistical tendencies arising from free movement exploration can improve error augmentation with customized training forces that vary across the trajectory. We hypothesized that with customized error augmentation participants will adapt faster to learning a visual-motor distortion and have greater improvement than participants receiving standard error augmentation and participants repetitively practicing the task. We tested twenty-one participants using a robotic exoskeleton device restricted to two degrees of freedom. We found that participants receiving customized forces adapted faster and consequently changed with smaller forces. Further, change in error was greatest for participants receiving customized forces. These promising results support the need for customization to target subject specific errors.