Soft robotic exoskeletons have been effective in supporting rehabilitation treatments and enhancing daily activities for neurotrauma, but it has been difficult to regain dexterity for tasks like playing musical instruments. In a recent study, a first-of-its-kind soft robotic hand exoskeleton (cover image) and machine learning algorithms are combined to help people relearn how to play piano by "feeling" the differences between the right and wrong renditions of the same piece.
This revolutionary technology, in contrast to other exoskeletons, offers exact force and guidance in recovering the delicate finger movements necessary for playing piano and other difficult activities. The data from the combined 80 taxels from the touch sensors in the fingertips were used to train the Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithms to classify these…
