HCIInterfaceForStroke

Abstract

The Robotics and Sensorimotor Control Laboratory (RoSenCo), led by Dr. Netta Gurari, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics, is dedicated to conducting neurological research with stroke survivors. Stroke is a leading cause of disability worldwide, and RoSenCo aims to contribute to the development of treatments by studying the effects of stroke on tactile perception. RoSenCo researchers have designed a series of experiments to advance their goals, and this project focuses on developing software to facilitate these experiments in a flexible and expandable manner. The software, known as RoSenCo Experiment Manager (RoSenCoExMan), has been implemented to control actuators and collect data from sensors at a rate of 1600Hz. It also provides real-time graphing of selected data streams, displays text-to-speech-powered audio-visual instructions for participants, and saves collected data in the required format for subsequent analysis. RoSenCoExMan is written in Python, utilizing various libraries for implementing features such as graphing, hardware access, and text-to-speech capabilities. The software employs multi-processing techniques to achieve the required performance. Opportunities for future work include extending the audio-visual participant feedback functionality to enable experiments utilizing more dynamic visuals, and the addition of a graphical user interface.